Of every field attached to a game catalogue entry, release year might look the least interesting on its own. It is also the field that makes almost every other kind of useful browsing possible.
Chronology Reveals Technology Shifts
Sorting a catalogue by year surfaces hardware transitions directly — the arrival of dedicated sound cards, the shift from floppy disks to CD-ROM, the arrival of 3D acceleration — in a way that browsing by genre or platform alone never does. The year-by-year retrospectives on this site exist specifically because chronology tells a story genre groupings cannot.
Regional Release Dates Complicate a "Simple" Field
A game's release year can genuinely differ between regions, sometimes by a full year or more, and a database has to decide which date it treats as canonical — usually the original release rather than a later international port, a nuance covered directly in Prince of Persia Ports Compared.
Year Enables Cross-Referencing Everything Else
Once release year is reliably recorded, it becomes possible to ask compound questions a flat list never supports: which platforms were most active in a given year, which genres a particular publisher favored in a specific stretch of time, or how quickly a design idea from one year showed up in the next.
A Field Worth Getting Right
Because so much else depends on it, release year deserves the same verification rigor described in Inside a Retro Gaming Archive, rather than being treated as a throwaway detail. Browse the full year listings to see chronology used as a primary organizing structure.
