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From: Dimensional Traveler <dtravel@sonic.net>
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.action
Subject: Re: A Completely Out-of-the-blue Gripe
Date: Wed, 9 Oct 2024 08:02:07 -0700
Organization: A noiseless patient Spider
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On 10/8/2024 6:47 PM, Spalls Hurgenson wrote:
> On Mon, 7 Oct 2024 19:26:52 -0700, Justisaur <justisaur@gmail.com>
> wrote:
> 
>> On 10/3/2024 9:00 AM, Spalls Hurgenson wrote:
>>>
>>> Prepare for the stupidest complaint I've yet made!
> 
> 
>> I'm actually with you although in my case it's Steam, because I look a
>> lot at older games, and it's the date it appeared on Steam, or was
>> re-released on Steam, as such I find their release dates about useless.
> 
> Steam is all over the place with its reported release dates.
> _Sometimes_ it will be the original release date. _Sometimes_ it will
> be when the game was reissued. And sometimes it will be -as you
> mentioned- when it appears on the Steam platform. It's a mess.
> 
> I'm a little more forgiving, though, since it's apparent that Valve
> just doesn't care as opposed to GOG's trying to manipulate the dates
> for their benefit. Arguably, many of these re-releases are "new'
> versons of the game (since most of them have been updated in one way
> or another to better run on modern hardware), so a modern release date
> isn't completely outrageous.
> 
> But I wouldn't mind some consistency.
> 
> PC release dates are weirdly hard to nail down anyway, especially with
> older games. Except for a handful of really high-profile games (Doom,
> Duke Nukem 3D, etc.) you usually can't narrow it down to better than
> the release _month_, and for some games you're lucky if you know the
> year. But back in the 80s and 90s, there often wasn't a hard-and-fast
> release date. Games were shipped and sold when they were available. In
> an era when many games were hand-packed by the developers themselves,
> and there was no just-in-time shipping, the release date depended a
> lot on when the store got the game (and few stores waited for a
> specific date; the games got put on shelves immediately).
> 
> Which is really annoying to those of us who'd like an exact date. But
> the past was a weird place. ;-)
> 
That keeps getting weirder as time passes.

-- 
I've done good in this world. Now I'm tired and just want to be a cranky 
dirty old man.