The Settlers series 30th anniversary!

Now in the 90s, 30 years ago, the world was quite a different place! Commodore existed as a company and Amiga did still have a place in the market. And thus the original The Settlers (Die Siedler) was released to the European market in November 1993 first for Amiga, and later in 1994 for MS-DOS.

Release date controversy

“Wait!” you might say. “Didn’t this anniversary happen already?” you may ask. We say: no. The anniversary date is only now getting close.

While old dates are really not critical for anyone’s enjoyment of the game and provides no immediate harm, getting the month or at least the quarter right is desirable for the purposes of celebrating an anniversary.

Some sources such as this PC-Welt news story from 2003 claims the release date to be June 30th, 1993. This date however is known to be incorrect: the original release target was October 1993, and due to delays the game was only available in stores around early December 1993. Power Play issue 11/1993 features this mention that proves June to be an impossible date:

There would be no need for such a print if the game was already out. And we know even these claims to be optimistic as the MS-DOS release got pushed to 1994. Both German and English demo DOS executables are dated April 5th, 1994.

The misinformation on the June release likely relates to Ubisoft acquisition of Blue Byte and was – most likely – invented by marketers to give an extra push to the Platinum Edition release containing all the four games of the series back in 2003. This 10th anniversary invention was then repeated in German medias with no further research, and this tradition of incorrect reporting has continued even to this day, for example by Heise.

To the journalists we wish to say: please do your research properly!

You also should not trust Wikipedia as your only source, and it does give incorrect dates. The release dates appear to be original research and while some of the provided sources link to magazines they do not confirm the claimed dates.

The best you can find is the CU Amiga Magazine Issue 046 where on page 178 (CU Review page 17) the release date for The Settlers is “November”. Somehow based on this the UK release date of the game was marked as November 24th, 1993 on the Wikipedia article. This exact date is nowhere to be found in the magazine. Out of curiosity I did dig the additions from history: first adds happened in July 2016 diff and the rest in this May 2017 diff.

Proving the exact availability date in stores is hard. For this reason this article has been dated for November 30th as a compromise: most likely the game only got to stores in December, but since the only proof we have now is the CU Amiga Magazine stating November release we ended up compromising the last day of November as the day for celebration.

Special thanks to Hallfiry for pointing out the 30th Anniversary and for providing additional information!