Given that its 30th anniversary was recently celebrated, a Double Fine member has been investigating when exactly the game was released.

As the birthday of Tim Schafer’s beloved motorcycle odyssey approached, his studio, Double Fine Productions, discovered that they didn’t know the exact date of Full Throttle’s original release. Peter Silk, Double Fine’s customer service specialist and amateur sleuth, began searching for the real release date. He documented the investigation on the Double Fine website. Double Fine claims the release date was April 30, 1995. However, Silk points out that there is no reliable source for this date, and that April 30, 1995, was a Sunday, when game shops were typically closed.

Silk checked the files on the original release disc and found that they were modified as late as May 2, 1995, which means the game couldn’t have been on store shelves before then. He uncovered an advertisement in The Daily Record, a Scottish newspaper, from the now-defunct Dixons department store. It advertised Full Throttle as arriving on Friday, May 19, 1995, priced at £40.

Even the full-page Full Throttle ads in game magazines of the time didn’t include a release date—just a phone number for inquiries. Silk discovered that retailer CompUSA had expected copies of Full Throttle as early as May 5, but due to delays, the retailer didn’t receive copies until at least May 18.

Because of these delays, Silk theorizes that the game never had a strict street date; stores simply began selling it whenever they got their shipments. It’s possible there was never an official release date. To dig deeper, Silk investigated when players started asking for tips and hints for the game online!

“Both IMDb and the unofficial LucasArts Fandom.com site say April 30, 1995. But then there are those that say April 20, and Wikipedia says May 19. Depending on the day, Google may give any of these three answers. So, what’s the truth? Perhaps the best 30th birthday present I could give to Full Throttle was to give it a real birthday. In the mid-90s, it was common for games to be released later in Europe than in the US. Stores often got the dates wrong because games weren’t as widely known or communicated before digital releases. Before May 19, 1995, nobody was asking for Full Throttle hints. But after that date, requests started flooding in,” Silk wrote.

So, May 19, 1995, might be the true date—since no one was asking about the game before then, it likely wasn’t on store shelves yet.

Source: PCGamer, Double Fine