December bonus: Book in progress update (Patreon)

Hello all, and (hopefully) happy holidays! This month's bonus bit is up, and it comes with Some Complications. I was very proud of the latest revision of From the Beginning, which now includes photos of almost every item to be covered in the book—there are just a tiny handful I need to reshoot, and just two games I am still hunting down. My intent was to post this and proudly say that the next step will be to write text and polish up the minor details... but then facts reared their head. Which is a good thing, a great thing! But also terribly inconvenient.

Thanks to the Gaming Alexandria Discord (by way of Kevin Bunch), I've managed to find concrete details on all SG-1000 releases through mid 1986 and all Super Cassette Vision releases through mid-1985. Up until now, all but one or two titles for these systems were only known to have shipped in a given year... and it turns out even those dates were largely based on hunches or... well, I don't know, really. But they weren't correct. A biweekly Japanese magazine called Game Machine, which was a trade publication focused on the coin-op biz, occasionally published roundups of JP consoles, with full title lists and seemingly precise by-month ship dates. This is information that does not seem to exist anywhere else, and it's a huge boon for this!

It turns out going by the catalog number of SCV games is a pretty reasonable approach, but the SG-1000 lineup was a creature of chaos, and the system's actual chronology bears no resemblance to the order in which games were numbered. Remember how Golgo 13 and Orguss were numbered in a way that made them appear to have been released in late 1983 but are known to have shipped in 1984? Yeah, that's basically everything on SG-1000 up through the advent of the MyCard format. According to Game Machine, even games like Borderline, which was numbered G-1001 and I've been treating as the "first" SG-1000 release, didn't actually make it to retail until March 1984. 

Some of these details seem hard to believe, but (1) Game Machine was a trade magazine for business owners and, from what I can tell, was focused on hard facts (with a heavy emphasis on piracy prevention) rather than consumer-bait speculation; (2) at least one widely disseminated release date (Girls Garden, 1984) has been debunked in a latter-day interview with a Sega dev who noted that the game actually shipped in early 1985, and GM has it down in early 1985. So, I'm inclined to use GM's chronologies as a guideline!

Unfortunately, that means this entire book needs to be reordered. The upside is that it will be a lot more accurate, and more interesting—monthly releases will now sit side-by-side across competing consoles! But that means a lot of work in the coming months.

It also means the approach I've been taking with Famiconversations is totally off-base and I'd honestly be better off scrapping the whole thing or starting over. That seems kind of depressing. But that's OK; starting next month, I have a certified RAD bonus project in mind anyway.

Well, that's it for this month's bonus—I spent a couple of vacation days chasing this info around. But please look forward to interesting, and more accurate, things in 2022. Thank you as always for your support!