If you haven’t heard about him, he’s become a bit of a character, in more ways than one.
As you may know, from time to time LEGO introduce a new set of ‘Minifigures’ and in 2013 Minifigures Series 10 hit the market, a range of 16 collectable minifigures, as usual but this time, Lego had introduced a special new feature.
They introduced a 17th figure, Mr Gold, a very rare ultra collectable character, of which only 5000 were produced and spread randomly across the whole manufacturing output, supposedly making it a surprise and a very exciting one at that, if you found one in your pack of Minifigures bought unsuspectingly from the toy shop.
However, the unique shape of Mr Gold, with his trademark top hat made it very easy to identify which packs of mini figures he was hiding inside, as the soft outer packaging made it possible to feel the shapes inside.
Knowing the value of Mr Gold would be huge, many collectors and even other unscrupulous individuals went to extremes to find the super special packs by rifling toy shops stocks and even resorting to ordering multiple packs online and ‘feeling’ them all before sending back the ordinary ones!
This led to some retailers having to seal the soft Minifigure packets inside rigid plastic outers to prevent people searching.
LEGO faced an unfortunate backlash from the episode, which became known as ‘Goldgate’ and have since distanced themselves from the affair.
However, that hasn’t stopped the value of Mr Gold soaring in recent years and although it’s not known exactly how many Mr Gold figures there are still in existence, it’s reported that an avid collector is likely to have to pay over £2000, on average and it’s been reported over £4500 in one case, if they want to own their own Mr Gold today.
So if you have a Mr Gold in your collection and didn’t know how much he’s worth, you might want to put him aside and treat him with a little more respect!
At Chorley Bricks, we have a wide range of lego sets to rent and buy.
Check our our FAQs page on how to rent lego sets and more information.