Talk:Realms of the Haunting

Release date?

Is the release date of 1997 for this correct? The date on the back of the box I have says 1996? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 80.194.234.186 (talk) 16:28, 28 November 2010 (UTC)

That's the copyright year. As another editor on Wikipedia informed me some years ago, while it's usually assumed that copyright date equals release date, in actuality products are usually copyrighted a few weeks before they're released. Usually that makes no difference, but if a game is being released in January, it often gets copyrighted in December of the previous year. As I noted in my 2018 edit summary for the article, while we don't have a release date for the game pinned down yet, reviews for it didn't start popping up until well into 1997 (for example, Next Generation reviewed it in an issue cover dated June 1997, which means it was hitting newsstands in April 1997), so a 1996 release seems highly improbable. Of course, given that the copyright year was 1996, it's also highly improbable that the game wasn't released until April of 1997, but my guess would be it's somewhere in the middle ground, in January or February of 1997. Given that editors keep changing the date, I'm going to try setting it at simply "1997" until we get a reliable source to identify the specific date. Martin IIIa (talk) 22:50, 22 August 2022 (UTC)

Source

• https://archive.org/stream/Computer_Gaming_World_Issue_149#page/n283/mode/2up/
• https://web.archive.org/web/19970606050353/http://www.next-generation.com:80/news/091196g.html
• https://web.archive.org/web/20160322201959/http://scans.roushimsx.com/PCGamer_1997_04_pg140.jpg
• https://archive.org/details/MicromanaTerceraEpocaSpanishIssue25/page/n25
• https://archive.org/details/gamelivepc045/page/n139
• https://web.archive.org/web/19970119100014/http://www.gremlin.co.uk/games/roth/index.html