I'm revisiting this topic to give an update as to my progress.
I've finished adding all of the European products I could find to the
Disc Releases article, which involved scouring the English, French, German, Italian, and Spanish versions of Amazon and eBay. I was pleasantly surprised at how much stuff was still available, although I did have to ask favors of a couple friends living in Germany and Italy to be proxy shipping destinations for a few sellers who wouldn't ship to America. The only items I couldn't find were the Spanish version of the City of Villains Collector's DVD Edition and the Italian version of the Good Versus Evil Combined Edition. (Please don't ask how much I spent on getting all that stuff.
)
Getting back to City of Heroes Deluxe, in addition to the similarities I mentioned before between the interior plastic case and the original American boxed version, there are different UPC codes used on the plastic case (lower numbers) and the Deluxe paper outer box (higher numbers). Why would NCsoft have done this if the interior case was not used for a previous retail release? It seems that this would clinch it for making that case . . . eeeexcept for the fact that the French verion of CoH Deluxe has the UPCs swapped. This, then, begs the question of how would NCsoft have known what the UPC would have been in-series for the later Deluxe version if the regular plastic case version was released first? Bottom line: I have no clue what the real story is. *sigh* I'm just glad I was able to find as many things as I did.
The last part of this project is to extend the same methodology to
game time cards. The problem here is that older package versions were replaced as new ones were issued to retailers, and few purchasers likely would have kept them as collectibles for later resale because the cards were consumable by design. I've had some minor success locating older packages, but I'm about six years too late to be doing this. They are, by and large, simply lost to time (pun not intended).
