Fahnn wrote: ↑Tue Apr 02, 2019 4:30 pm
I realise that Tim should know best, but that timescale is puzzling to say the least. If it was released in 1986, why did none of the magazines give it a review for another (at least) four months? That's got to be an unusual state of affairs. I didn't get my copy until 17th June 1987 (found the receipt!) but I think - as a sensible boy - I waited until after my 'O' Levels to buy it. As I mentioned elsewhere, I apparently had the first PAWed game reviewed in CRASH (issue 44, out in August 1987) and I sent it off to them in late July. Surely if PAW had been available since 1986, there would have been plenty of PAW-authored games released prior to that? Especially as, If you'd used The Quill, PAW wasn't much of a stretch and it didn't take long to learn the new features.
Like I said earlier, it may have been 1987... Tim just needs to check the details and see when the earliest copies were sold. But it's either the very end of 1986 or the very beginning of 1987 so there really isn't much in it. All the PAWs stuff is copyrighted 1986 so it was all produced in 1986. There were testing versions floating around then and some of the fanzines ran previews in the latter part of the year. As Tim has said, the aim was to publish at the end of 1986, to try and follow GAC's release as close as possible.
Why no reviews until a few months later? Well, all the magazines are written well in advance! The cover date often refers to the following month, and columns and specialist freelance reviews were often submitted a month or two earlier... reviewing a authoring tool isn't quite as quick as reviewing a game (if you do it properly).
[Edit: For example... in StooB's post above, he refers to Mike Gerrard writing in the "March 1987" issue of Your Sinclair about a delay to the PAWs release until January 1987. So Mike must've been writing that prior to January 1987... for the March 1987 issue... which was presumably published in February.. I'm guessing, from what Mike has said about lead-in dates in the past, that he was probably writing that in November 1986]