LucasArts adventure gaming classic Full Throttle recently celebrated its 30th birthday. Exactly how recently, you ask? Well, that's the question. During birthday preparations for Tim Schafer's beloved motorcycle odyssey, Schafer's studio Double Fine Productions realised it didn't know the precise date of Full Throttle's initial release.
Consequently, Double Fine's Customer Support Specialist and amateur sleuth Peter Silk (which is a perfect detective name, by the way) launched an investigation to discover the true release date. He detailed this enquiry in a thoroughly engrossing article on the Double Fine website.
Silk begins by outlining the problem, which is that, according to the Internet, Full Throttle has numerous original release dates. "IMDb and the unofficial LucasArts Fandom.com site both say April 30th, 1995. But then there are the ones that say April 20th, meanwhile Wikipedia says May 19th. Google likes to give any of these three answers, depending on how it feels on the day."
Double Fine itself considers April 30, 1995 to be the release date. But Silk notes that there is no reliable source for this date, Moreover, April 30 landed on a Sunday in 1995, an unlikely day to release a game given shops were typically closed on Sundays in the nineties.
Suspicious, Silk checked the files on the original release disc, and discovered they were still being modified as late as May 2nd, 1995, meaning the game could not have been on shelves before that date. "Our official anniversary date was simply impossible. So what’s the truth?" Silk writes. "Perhaps the best 30th birthday present I could give Full Throttle was a real birthday."
Silk's initial research took him to Scotland, or at least, an advert in Scottish newspaper The Daily Record from defunct high-street retailer Dixons. This advertised Full Throttle as available for £39.99 on Friday, May 19, 1995.
It seems like a slam dunk. However, as Silk notes "In the mid-90s it was extremely common for games to be released in Europe later than in the US, and stores frequently got dates wrong, because they weren't as widely known and communicated in the time before digital releases."
Silk then goes on to check "every newspaper clipping in every country I could find," but none of them feature the game's actual release date. Even the full-page Full Throttle ad splashed across videogame magazines of the era didn't have the actual release date on it, instead stating "Call 1800-STARWARS for availability".
Silk's investigation then hits a further snag, as he discovers that retailer CompUSA was expecting copies of Full Throttle as early as May 5th. But this delivery was delayed, with CompUSA not receiving copies until at least May 18. Given the delay, Silk theorises "this might mean that the game didn't strictly have one street date, but that stores started selling it as and when they got their delayed copies delivered."
In other words, Full Throttle's formal release date is elusive because it may never have had one in the first place. Unsatisfied with this answer, Silk comes up with an ingenious solution. Instead of looking for when the game started coming out in stores, he checks when players started asking for hints and tips for the game online. "Before May 19th, 1995, nobody was asking for Full Throttle hints," Silk observes. "However, after that date, they started to flood in."
In their requests for assistance, these bewildered gamers help pinpoint May 19, 1995 as the day Full Throttle was properly released. "Can it really be said that an adventure game truly exists in the hearts and minds of the public until that moment?" Silk asks. Truer words were never spoken.
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