Release dates for game titles are usually a source of frustration for many retro gaming researchers, especially ones doing research on games released in North America and Europe in the mid-1980s and before. The same researchers look upon the release date materials for the Japanese market in envy, as marketing and sales materials for the video game market, especially in the case of consoles, have for the most part been kept consistently and very accurately. This is probably most likely due to the fact that Japan is only as large as the state of California, which means that distribution is not as wide inside the country, and at the same time does not have the multitude of markets and borders found in Europe, which meant that distribution could be handled by companies in the same channels and could be documented in a centralized way.
This is not to say that the Japanese market does not have its own release date mysteries, of course, as I discovered while trying to find out the release date of Mr. Goemon–and Sega and SNK researchers have also had had their share of problems sourcing the exact release dates for games released before the release of the Famicom. Release date issues would be resolved as the markets matured, and yet there are still a few perplexing issues here and there that pop up in my research.
The Ganbare Goemon series is not without its own set of issues in this matter. One can raise doubts about the release date of Karakuri Dochu, for example. The official release date of the game is technically July 30, 1986–but Family Computer Magazine reports it as being August 1, and materials from Konami itself seemingly try to avoid the issue, whether in promotional materials or in the television commercial (which does not list a release date–although that is probably because it was broadcast after the release). To be fair, however, one can explain these discrepancies by the fact that it was an early Famicom and an early-ish Konami game. (It was probably timed to coincide with [school] summer vacation, so a two-day discrepancy is not significant.)
Five years later, the market had changed significantly in Japan, and yet there is one more odd discrepancy that I kept finding in my research for Sarawareta Ebisumaru: all Konami documents announce the release date as being December 25… And yet all other documents I have found (mostly Famitsu, to be fair) put it as December 22.
Some readers might infer that Konami might have wanted the game to coincide with Christmas Day for a stronger marketing push, although Christmas in Japan is celebrated differently, and it is doubtful it would have made a big difference. It is possible that either Konami or Famitsu made a mistake, or it is also possible that Konami’s release date was a suggested release date, and Famitsu reported the date when retailers would start selling the shipments they received. One important thing to note as well is that, like Yuki-Hime, Sarawareta Ebisumaru was delayed significantly–by two months at least–and it is possible that the December 25 release date was just a date that Konami estimated when the game would arrive at retail. Unlike January releases, when manufacturing had been shut down for the New Year’s Holiday and distributors and retailers would have had to pin down a specific date in advance, one can imagine that the end of the year was a rush to the finish.
Regardless of what the answer might be, it is also true that this is a literal piece of trivia. And yet it might be important to keep in mind with other releases in the future.
Project Goemon 