New discovery - N64 Grey Turok Rage Wars cart

[goatdan]

It's not about what's "sexy" or "cool"; it's about what's logical. How many loose Wii discs do you see being sold at Target? Because that's what the appropriate analogy would be. These games were manufactured and packed up as loose carts. It's completely illogical to suggest that they'd be shipped off to retail stores to be sold. My suggestion that perhaps a small number would be shipped to stores was in regard to display copies. Maybe 5000 were manufactured, who knows, but that's still a very small run either way. But considering the cost of manufacturing carts, the fact that none were selling at retail presumably, and the unusual circumstances of a recall, I'm sure they'd try to minimize their losses and manufacture as few as necessary.

Your assumption here is that the singular box of cartridges is how the entire run was packaged. Considering that it is one data point -- one, singular box -- all that I have been trying to suggest is that it was probably sold in both ways. It's not too difficult to ask to package up 4000 and keep 1000, for instance. Oh, and I would agree that it was a tiny run and was never trying to claim what you said I was -- that 10% of the run was grey. I would bet it would be more like 250,000 black carts were made, and then they reran 5,000 at the end to deal with complaints and to tack on to their sales. An extremely tiny run, probably making it equal to the smallest runs that the system had for it.

But again, logically, you can never back up either story fully. You can never *prove* that they weren't sold and I can never *prove* that they were, because if you have a boxed copy that contains a grey cartridge, you don't know if they got that because they mailed it in or if they bought it that way.

But really -- I. Don't. Care. I thought it was an interesting conversation that I could lend some other data points too because I have both had a bunch of these carts for a long time, and have some inner workings of how production worked around this time at other companies. I never claimed that I should be making a 'rarity guide' or whatever off it. You and a few others got extremely defensive that these HAD to be mail in only, and there is no other way to do it.

And again, *that's the better story*. So it doesn't matter what I've seen or the data that I can lend to the hunt. As you said, the other collectors will hunt and find the data, so it doesn't really matter what I had or didn't have. A considerable amount of video game history is built on conjecture, and the more interesting the story, the more people hear it and are interested by it. If these were a late run of the games, it doesn't sound as good as if these were a mail in offer only that almost no one took up because no one heard about it.

Neither of us are going to prove anything from this, and it benefits me more to have it your way... sexier backstory = higher sale prices... before the whole mail in only thing, I had 10 copies of this for YEARS without selling them for $9.99 apiece. Now, the one on eBay is selling for $50+. Why? Because the collecting community made the story of them sexy and it spread quickly because of that.

So, again, I agree with the data presented that it is clear that these were absolutely never sold, and they were probably made in a quantity of 150, tops.