Year of Release Data (2600)

[StanJr]

In the 2600 Rarity Guide database, for most of the games I have looked at, the "Year of Release" data is listed as n/a. Why? Clearly the collection knowledge of the participants on this forum possess this information. Is there an obvious oversight on my part as to why this is n/a?

[pangasinan]

It is available,you just got to know where to look

 

http://www.atarimania.com/advanced-search-atari-2600-vcs-game-_2_G.html

[Rom Hunter]

This is not exactly the same, though.

 

In most cases, our database lists the copyright year that's visible on the label of the cart.

 

Which is not always the year of release.

 

[Kurisu]

I think release date as accurate as we can get would be nice. Of course, some games may have been in various areas of the US (let alone Europe and the rest of the world) at different times, so that would complicate matters way too much.

 

Month and Year would be best, day if we knew it, but that would be a lesser concern.

[Albert]

In the 2600 Rarity Guide database, for most of the games I have looked at, the "Year of Release" data is listed as n/a. Why? Clearly the collection knowledge of the participants on this forum possess this information. Is there an obvious oversight on my part as to why this is n/a?

Not really an oversight, per se, but unless someone can come up with definitive release dates for games, it's a lot of guesswork. The original titles that came out with the 2600 would be easy to discern, but after that things start to get muddled. Copyright dates on labels are not accurate, nor are copyrights displayed in the games themselves. This is especially true for labels, since the copyright would often change as a game was released repeatedly throughout the years (original text label, then picture label, silver label, red label, they could all have different copyrights). Heck, even the same type of label will often be reprinted over time with different copyright years (I've seen this often with silver/gray/red labels).

 

Preferring not to guess, we just left this field as "n/a" for most games.

 

..Al

[gdement]

You could have a separate field for "original copyright date". Might be useful to at least have that info rather then nothing.

[+Random Terrain]

And remember that I have some release dates:

 

http://www.randomterrain.com/atari-2600-memories-history-1982.html

 

http://www.randomterrain.com/atari-2600-memories-history-1983.html

 

 

I would love some paperwork from department stores or anything like that showing when games first came in.