Dec 11, 2016 3:00:07 GMT 1 dumithesandwich said: Either that, or the one shown in the Promo was really gold plastic, and they just took apart a GBA SP, and carefully put together the legit gold casing. At least that's my theory.
You'd have to take it apart to gold plate every part seperately, if not the buttons would get gold plated aswell and it would look really bad. I would say the one in the promo was a cgi model, or atleast some cgi was used.
That one isn't a gold one, it just has the inner plastic parts golden, either someone took apart a golden colored US model and a black one and put them together or there really is such an edition, who knows. Nintendo kind of went crazy with all the special editions they had for the GBA SP. Here's a somewhat incomplete list of all the differently colored consoles Nintendo released over the years: www.consolecolors.com/nintendo.html
Which was linked in the original post, I have to wonder if it is one of those automatically generated webpages or if it was a mistake. The low price makes me believe that they never actually had one in their possession and it was just added because it was in nintendo's catalog or it was scanned off of a competitor's page.
They seem extremely aware of the value of the gameboy, they note in the description that only 7 were ever made, yet they sell for just under $100? That seems close to the regular Zelda version prices on eBay, the one's without the 24k gold and triforce.
I have to wonder if this was simply an error/bad description, a computer generated page or another form of a mistake. If they knew that only 7 were made, I feel like it would be extremely unlikely that they would only demand $99.95 for it when it stands to reason that a 1/7 model could easily fetch hundreds, if not thousands on eBay.
I believe that they are in a vault somewhere possibly one of the sponsors of the contest got one, maybe that could be a rabbit hole to follow?
There's been some new info since my last huge post in this thread, and also I'm not sure if I ever updated the thread with the annotations I added to my YouTube video so I'll kinda recap/reply to some points.
Last I counted, I had tracked 6 out of the 7 GBAs. Turns out that one of them ended up being fake, so at the very least, that's one less. And since there's so much confusion about custom gold models vs. the gold Zelda models, etc. I'm going to guess at least one, if not two of those auctions from like 2009 were misreported on (since all the listing links were gone), so that's another one or two less. Regardless, I definitely believe there are some floating around there.
That brings me to the estarland listing. I too was suspicious about the listing so I contacted the site and asked them about it. They claimed that yes, that listing was in stock and sold in 2013. I guess there is a possibility that it wasn't actually the 24k one they had in stock, but estarland seems like a pretty disorganized website to begin with and they do buy used products. So I could easily see them getting this in a shipment from the UK or something, listing it weird or something, and then when it sells someone is like "wait what did we just sell?" And then they researched it and made the page more glamorous than it originally was. But all of this is just speculating I guess.
I personally believe that they all went out in some way though, and that Nintendo never had information regarding the contest available to the public in a way where someone could have easily copied it or used it in a false listing.
So I have a red GBA SP and I think nintendo actually never had these GBA's and it was all a hoax but this is nintendo so that theory is probably wrong though I can't think of any other way
I was on amazon searching up GBA's and some special edition GBA comes up called the Gameboy Advance Sp: Famicom Edition (Limited Edition)). It costs $294.53
Well I am planning on sending Nintendo an E-mail about this I need to figure out Nintendo's E-mail and I won't be on alot because I am at school right now.
Believe it or not, pretty early on in the search I tweeted Bill Trinen as well as Nintendo UK, and neither of them replied to me. Not to mention, the only person who would really know anything about it is the director of marketing for Nintendo UK in the mid 2000s, whose contact info wasn't available online.
What I'm saying is modern day Nintendo would know nothing about that contest. I think we've done a pretty good job solving the mystery to this point though, and all we need to do now is wait for someone with a legit handheld and/or a golden ticket/authentic winner slip to come forward.
Believe it or not, pretty early on in the search I tweeted Bill Trinen as well as Nintendo UK, and neither of them replied to me. Not to mention, the only person who would really know anything about it is the director of marketing for Nintendo UK in the mid 2000s, whose contact info wasn't available online.
What I'm saying is modern day Nintendo would know nothing about that contest. I think we've done a pretty good job solving the mystery to this point though, and all we need to do now is wait for someone with a legit handheld and/or a golden ticket/authentic winner slip to come forward.
I would think that we need atleast a winner's notification (a letter from nintendo congratulating the winner and so on) or a golden ticket, otherwise I would call all of them shown so far fake. As of now I am pretty sure that the Spanish one was fake, simply because he claimed he had it tested. As I wrote earlier, you can't test gold platings without actually damaging the surface (you scratch some of the gold off and use an acid to determine whether it is gold at all and how clean this gold is), and the Spanish one isn't damaged.
Ok, so I'm coming in a bit late to the thread, and created an account just to continue this on, but I was able to find the Head of Marketing at the time's LinkedIn if that can be of any use uk.linkedin.com/in/dawnpaine and she also has some info about her on another website: www.marketingweek.com/vision100/profile/dawn-paine/ I contacted a YouTuber by the name of Lemino about this since he was rather successful in solving other mysteries.
))) is it real?
