The community's glory days bore a horn o'plenty of great LEC fan sites, on that we can all agree, but I think my favorite was The LucasArts Museum. You know, the one that endeavored to collect, index and photograph the boxes, manuals, game media, inserts, and all manner of increasingly frivolous and obscure paraphernalia associated with every release version of the LEC adventure games?
As an obsessive myself, that site was my jam, but whenever I'd visit the forums I felt way out of my league. It was both enjoyable and immensely intimidating to peruse threads and see people distinguish between versions based on LFL file datestamps, argue over which pressing a floppy disk label denoted, discover some hitherto unknown budget release of Full Throttle available only from the back of a magazine, and ask for a ballpark on how much the copy of Zak McKracken they stumbled onto at a garage sale was worth on eBay.
This noble archeology of LucasArts esoterica occasionally rose to frightening heights; there's literally a post pointing out the existence of two printings of the Maniac Mansion hint book where the only discrepancy is a different Lucafilm Games fax number in the booklet's covers. When you can shame a guy who ran a Maniac Mansion fan site when he was eleven into feeling like a casual fan, you're in the 99th percentile.
While the webmaster (you know him as longtime reader/forumer "freddie)" eventually had to stop growing the museum - I have to imagine that making a hobby out of obtaining copies of the FM Towns Loom incurs mighty overhead - it remains as an invaluable resource, and its forums still see occasional activity (read: way more than ours) announcing interesting finds.
And lest you think I'm overselling that, some guy recently found an eBay auction for an Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis yo-yo. I won't be so bold as to say this has never been seen before, because that tends to invite swift and stern correction, but it did seem to stump the seasoned collectors on the forums, which is impressive enough.
Appears to have been created (and possibly sold) sometime in about 1997-2000 (during the big 90's yo-yo craze)...
A black (don't know if it had any canals) version of the yo-yo was a gift with purchase for 30$ orders late 1999. So unless this yo-yo has severely faded through the years (it is clear brown with a hint of purple) they made at least these two colors/versions... I don't know if the black version had the same pattern inside as this one.
I'm tempted to make a joke like, "It's the kind of thing Omar Al-Jabbar would have been proud to offer to Indy in a trade!" except I think he actually can offer you a yo-yo at some point, so dang.
Source: The LucasArts Museum forums
Call me Squinky
it appears it sold - clone did you buy it?