How do you confirm old games' release dates?

Last year I started contributing to The Cutting Room Floor's page on The Fantastic Adventures of Dizzy, and then another editor started this talk page with some questioning of how the game's month of initial release is in dispute. So that got me thinking, how were the dates obtained for this site's original game list, and why do many of them differ from Wikipedia's? For one thing, if Dizzy: Prince of the Yolkfolk really came out four months before Spellbound Dizzy, I bet people wouldn't be so ready to call it "Dizzy VI..."

Then there's GameFAQs, which places a lot more Dizzy computer games into 1990 and other early games a year ahead of what other sources say, but it lists all the 1991/1992 NES versions of The Fantastic Adventures of Dizzy as 1993, probably just because most of the Fantastic Dizzy ports came out in 1993. And that's another problem, just taking one date and assuming it applies to all versions of a game when clearly extra time was taken to redevelop it for newer platforms! So does anyone have any idea what references are reliable for sourcing these dates to straighten out the Dizzy series history?

Hi.

We got our release date information from the Oliver Twins' themselves, from certain pages in the "Let's Go Dizzy" book that was published a few years ago.
More specifically, Pages 162 and 163 from the book provides full listings of each game the Olivers worked on and the dates they were released on.

That's where we base our information on, while other websites have information that's out of date.

Hope this helps. :smile:

Thanks for the prompt response! I just hope the Oliver Twins kept accurate records then.
It also occurred to me that we could use magazine scans from when the games were new to get a good estimate of when the games came out. If they're reviewing a game that had already gone on sale, then that probably happened less than a couple of months before the magazine's cover date. Projected releases in magazines could change, but they give a good idea of what was in the works when, too!

It just seems strange that we have this story passed around everywhere about how The Fantastic Adventures of Dizzy only sold a quarter of what it should have because it missed the holiday season, but if it was delayed a whopping eleven months, then that should have placed it around the start of the next holiday season! It also seems strange that one of CodeMasters' first two Nintendo releases would be so late in their first year, but maybe that's why all the 1991 games' bootup logos already have a tile for "92" hidden in their graphics memory, just so they'd be ready in case of any further delays.

I just discovered that NESCartDB lists a specific month for the Release Date of many of the Camerica games, but then there's an Est First Run for the board that's a later month? How does that work? Is it just saying that the same cartridge type was still being manufactured or sold as late as then? It's just too bad they still only have one Codemasters game out of all the European releases, Cosmic Spacehead, and that the years they have up for those appear to be mostly placeholders based on the Camerica releases.

I suppose some of the timeline of the cartridge production might have been estimated by studying the evolution of the PCBs themselves.

Another thing that helps is when every game for one system has a serial number to indicate their relative release order. That is concerning that the Cartoon Time series had a different order, though... I wonder how many systems other than ZX Spectrum had numbers like that!