Quote Originally Posted by WCP View Post
Ideally, there would be somebody that used to work at Software ETC or Babbages or Electronics Boutique back in the early 90's, that had a ton of printouts that showed the actual days they got their inventory in, and the day that it was put up for sale. Such a list would be worth it's weight in gold, in trying to actually have accurate release date info for the very late 80's and early 90's game releases. I'm sure there is some kind of listing or printout that exists. Maybe a Toys-R-Us database or something. Problem is, most of these companies have changed over their computer systems several times by now, so unless they backed up all that info, you'd never get it. Plus, we are talking about records from the very late 80's and early 90's. Would these companies really hold onto these records ?
Even with such data, it still wouldn't be necessarily accurate. It would only indicate when that retailer got the game, and back then not all retailers got games at the same time, so other places might have gotten it as much as a month earlier or later.

It might not even indicate when all stores in the chain had gotten the game, as things were very much regional, so a TRU in California might have gotten the game significantly earlier than a TRU in Michigan or wherever.

It's actually pretty amazing at how coordinated the game industry has gotten release dates nailed down so that it's now incredibly rare any place gets a game more than a day or so off from any other place. For a lot of stuff (Transformers, for instance), you still find them showing up in certain regions long before you can find them elsewhere.