[quote name='Cyrian']You couldn't just walk in anywhere and buy a handful of gold Zelda 64s, a lot of places didn't even get enough for their pre-orders (of course now that I've said that someone will say that's exactly what they did, but that would have been the huge exception to the rule)[/QUOTE]
Man, I remember being so upset over that, too. I remember Target doing a pre-sell with some figures and I did it there. Then, the week before release, they tell me that the pre-sell does not gaurantee a copy. So, I cancel and pre-order it at Toys R Us. When I picked it up at Toys R Us, they gave me the "normal" version. I figured I'd run to Target, which would be my best bet since they weren't reserving anything... The same person who told me they weren't doing reserves for pre-sells wouldn't sell me one now without having a pre-sell receipt. I was so pissed.... I argued with her for awhile. Her manager was even going to give me a gold cartridge, but she went out of her way to convince him not to. I did not like that person at all....
I was pretty friendly with the staff at a local Electronics Boutique back then and a gold copy sat there on reserve for about a month - since the person who reserved it never picked it up, one of the guys there let me exchange my opened game for the gold one.
Yeah, I can attest that the gold cartridge was definitely truly "limited" unlike, say, the Maximum Carnage red cartridge. Did that yellow DK64 cartridge ever end up being limited?
Awhile back, after I got a job where I made way more money, I started in on this kick of resecuring some old SNES/Genesis games that I had traded in. I paid way too much for some of them. Right now, they are worth so much less than what I paid. Some of those prices were due to there being an Ebay dry spell where none were being sold factory sealed and I couldn't really judge their market value. I paid way too much for stuff like Looney Tunes B-Ball (my biggest trade-in regret... $5 trade-in, I don't even wanna say what I paid for my factory sealed copy), The Death and Return of Superman, Michael Jackson's Moonwalker for the Genesis, a "like new" Super Mario RPG which I ended up reselling for about 1/3 of what I paid for it a few years ago since it ended up on the VC.
Even if this Super Mario All-Stars LE ends up being worth something, I doubt we're going to see crazy values out of it. Maybe one day someone will sell one for $100.... I'll be surprised, though. One other thing I'll say is that I went to a few stores today that had 'em and noticed alot of copies would drive those with OCD crazy. I saw multiple copies with some blotches on the sides of the outer box where the gold ink was missing. A "perfect" copy seemed rare in my area.