That was funny you noticed that article. I spotted it this morning before you posted it.
You must have quite a few Gamasutra readers reading your blog as well. Some guy named Joe Zachery posted exactly what you said in the comments. He said: “All you have to do is find the legal fingerprints. Products such as video games must be copyrighted and there is a legal trail.”
The writer got all butthurt about that. This was his response: “Joe, read the article, I spell out exactly when the game was copyrighted and even link to the submission. It didn’t help.”
That’s what happens when you question journalists. They tell you to “read the article” even though you did. Personally, I don’t even see why these writers bother to respond to comments. You did the work. You wrote the article. Move on to the next project. Why sit there are belittle your readers just to reinforce how right you are and how wrong they are? Ego is a hell of a thing.
Legal records are the fastest and often most accurate route to determine when a product was released. It’s why geneology revolves around legal records and not the person actually going to the location.
But what if the legal records aren’t there? You have to go back like a century to start to see many problems. Many fires destroyed records. Sometimes places were still wilderness where legal records weren’t taken.
There would be a legal trail for any video game released in the United States… especially for a foreign company like Nintendo.
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