Harrow posted:

My gut feeling is that making a fair rule about release dates would be kind of complicated. I'd want to say "when the game is available to most people" would be a good guideline for what year to use, but sometimes there's a pretty big gap, or a game comes out in Japan and the US but not the EU for a long time (or Japan and EU but not the US, in Xenoblade's case), or things like that, and it all just gets fuzzy. Or games that are really good and important but didn't get an international release for decades (for example Live A Live) would be really hard to actually list.

I'd just ask that people not cheat release dates too egregiously. Like I wouldn't attribute Chrono Trigger to 2009 because that's when it finally got an official release in Europe, for example.