When Was Full Throttle Released?

You'd think it'd be a simple question.

"Since the dawn of recorded history" is a term used when you need to get readers to imagine a stretch of time thousands of years long. A time that is so distant that we don't even know for sure what happened before it, because nobody... well, recorded it.

But it’s not like someone just hit ‘record’ one day, and then BAM: history was recorded. There have been upgrades. The printing press, the invention of photography, sound and video recording – all of these and more made history successively more recorded.

Then history became so recorded that it made everything before that seem like it barely was at all. We live in a time where if you live in a high-tech society then it all goes down. Dates, events, pictures, video, everything recorded from our most mundane musings, to our most important proclamations. In fact, so much is on record on the Internet that it's a bit of a problem: it's easier than ever to get an answer, and thus easier than ever to get a wrong answer.

Which leads me to the question I found myself digging into a few weeks ago: what date was Full Throttle first released? Easy question, right? ...Right?

The Internet thinks it knows. At time of writing, most sites that keep track of such things; like 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.

Previously, here at Double Fine, we’ve gone with the crowd and marked it as April 30th. 

It's an important anniversary for Full Throttle this year though - 30 years! I wanted to make sure the date we had was based on something real. So I started looking into this supposed April 30th release date, and I discovered a few interesting facts:

Firstly, none of the sites reporting this date cite a reliable source.

Secondly, April 30th 1995 was a Sunday. This is starting to look unlikely.

Thirdly, and perhaps most damningly, the files on the original release disc include ‘last modified’ dates, and some of the files were modified as late as May 2nd, 1995.

Our official anniversary date was simply impossible. So what’s the truth? I had to find out. Perhaps the best 30th birthday present I could give Full Throttle was a real birthday.

Newspapers and magazines are sure to know!

The 90s explosion in how much information we have access to feels like it happened quite suddenly, in hindsight. But it wasn't instant. Full Throttle came out in the middle of this shift, and so while it is possible to find scattered crumbs about its release, it's not as easy as you may think to pin down. At first we had to rely partially on The Old Ways.

To start correcting the record, I first considered the Wikipedia date. How was it cited? As it turned out, pretty unreliably.

The citation is from a Scottish newspaper ad for a store called Dixons which stated the game would be available on the 19th May. This wasn't nothing, but it also wasn't enough. 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.

I checked every newspaper clipping in every country I could find without luck. All I could tell was that by late May all the ads started to say ‘Out Now!’ instead of ‘Coming Soon!’ But there was nothing definitive.

Surely the original full-page magazine ads would give us a release date?

I even looked to the stars. What did Joyce Jillson know that the rest of us didn’t?

Deep Internet archives to the rescue

I started to ask around online. Perhaps someone remembers buying it on day one. Maybe they kept the receipt in the box. Some people do that kind of thing, and I don't hold it against them. What if someone kept hold of an ancient IRC chat log? Those were formative communities for many folk who have gone on to have careers in the game industry, including at Double Fine.

Eventually, someone suggested trawling an old Usenet group. What’s that? Sort of a precursor to Internet forums, these were places for Internet users with related interests to connect. The great news is that they're still archived online. One such group was the catchily-named comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.adventure. There was a real chance that here someone might have the answer from the very dawn of recorded Internet history.

And they did! 

Kinda.

Apparently CompUSA was expecting the game on May 5th. But when eager fans came to claim their copy, they came up empty, occasionally citing some sort of "manufacturing delay" and giving wildly varying answers about when to expect it.

A delay past May 5th isn't surprising, given what we know from the disc contents. It would be rather unlikely that it would have been delivered to stores less than a week after the files were put on the disc. According to at least one second-hand report, it looks like Tim agreed:

At least we have a date on the Wrap Party now, which was enough of an event to see a little TV News action:

OK so we’ve confirmed out that the stores did get them later than expected. 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. That's deeply unsatisfying, if we’re looking for a real date to celebrate.

The Answer

The first date I could find of someone picking up the game from a store is May 18th. But somehow that answer didn't feel satisfying either. While a couple of people got it that early, many more weren't able to get it until the following day. There were some that had to wait even longer, wondering why they had to wait while Europeans already were playing. Am I really going to call it the 18th, just on the basis of a few lucky ones whose stores got them a bit earlier than most?

In all this mess, I wondered what release date we could stand by that would feel truly authentic to fans.

The answer that came to me is this: you know an adventure game is out when someone asks for a hint online. Can it really be said that an adventure game truly exists in the hearts and minds of the public until that moment? So it turns out Wikipedia was right - just for the wrong reasons. Before May 19th, 1995, nobody was asking for Full Throttle hints. However after that date, they started to flood in.

So, when was Full Throttle released?

May 19th, 1995.

Ish.

I’d like to acknowledge the efforts of Daniel Albu, Dan Wishart, Ben Ward and Jay Walsh for many useful pieces of information and suggestions that helped me piece this together, the website dosdays.co.uk whose meticulous record keeping of the contents of discs helped me realize there was a mystery to uncover in the first place, and the good folk of comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.adventure without whom we may never have found any sort of answer. Do you think you have a more accurate answer? Reach out at support@doublefine.com and enlighten us!