I. M. Meen - Release Date Investigation

According to a multitude of websites, I. M. Meen was released on August 11th, 1995. This date is sourced from a review of the game in the California-based Contra Costa Times newspaper.

I've always had a problem with this. Firstly, you can't just immediately base a game's release date off of a single review in a daily newspaper - you have to make sure that there aren't any other earlier publications that reviewed or covered the released game. Adding onto that, there are a small handful of reviews of I. M. Meen which cover it like a newly-releasing game AND predate the August 11th review. The most notable of these would be the Electronic Entertainment review that called the game "Doom Jr.", dated to April 16th, 1995 (and possibly earlier - magazines are written in the month(s) before publication).

So, there's a possibility that the game was released earlier than the August '95 date. Can we figure out how much earlier it was? I think we can.

Sections:

File Date Checkups -- An Official Release Period -- A Triple-Threat of Borderline Dates -- Oh, Right, The Rerelease Too -- A Forgotten UK Release -- The Release Dates As Of Writing

File Date Checkups

As per usual, my first step was doing a general file date checkup on the data of both the final game and its shareware demo. This is mainly to get a general sense of when I. M. Meen was finalized - a starting point, so to speak. To reuse a passage from my Hotel Mario release date investigation:

"A cool feature about CD/DVD-based games is that the files stored on their disk reflect the last time they were updated. For example, the released version of Zelda's Adventure had its last files updated on March 27th, 1995, while Link: The Faces of Evil's latest file date was June 24th, 1993. This is handy as it both points to when a specific game went gold and disproves any "release date" that occurred before it."

So, when was the magic labyrinth of I. M. Meen completed?

The final game was finished on March 14th, 1995, while the shareware demo was built on May 22nd, 1995. Both of these dates are placed far enough from the August 1995 date that they don't outright contradict it. Other than giving a lower boundary to the period that I. M. Meen was released in (that March date), there's not much here.

Or is there?!

Consider the fact that the shareware demo for I. M. Meen has a sell screen for the full game. Also consider the fact that "I.M. Meen is at your stores today!" is written on it:

While this might seem like an obvious thing, it's very interesting that at the time the shareware demo for I. M. Meen was built and released, the full game was already out. For the Chill Manor and (lost) Math Invaders demos, their sell screens write about the titles like they haven't been released yet. While it's unknown when, exactly, the shareware demo was released, its simplicity and easiness to produce gives us a rough release timeframe between late May and that August 11th date.

Okay, that's a promising start... but can we get an official source that has a date for I. M. Meen? Maybe from Simon & Schuster or Animation Magic?

An Official Release Period

Something cool about the mid-to-late-90s was the formulation and expansion of the dot-com bubble. Every big business wanted a slice of that freshly-baked Internet pie, and created their own websites for intrepid Netscape explorers to venture into. Simon & Schuster had their own series of sites, including one for Simon & Schuster Interactive, but any mention of I. M. Meen (let alone any Action Learning title) was not archived by the Internet Archive.

But you know who did have a website, AND has it fully archived on the Internet Archive? Capitol Multimedia!

Yes, that's right. Capitol Multimedia - who, if you don't know, was the company that bought Animation Magic circa 1995 - had its very own website, complete with a section dedicated to their titles. While it's PC-focused and doesn't mention any CD-i titles (sad face), it does have a section for the Action Learning trilogy...

And it lists I. M. Meen as having a release period of summer 1995! Nice! Given that summer starts in June, I think it's a bit unlikely that May was the release month of the game. (By the way, Chill Manor would be released in November 1996, while Math Invaders (or SS Pythagoras as it's called here) would be pushed back to summer 1997.)

It's a shame that the date isn't more specific, but at least we've got a narrower range now. Can we do better?
We can, actually... though it's a bit of a tossup between two months.

A Triple-Threat of Borderline Dates

First off, I. M. Meen is a special game in that it actually has its very own ISBN number - 0-671-89817-5. Normally, ISBN numbers are used for varying types of books, but it appears that I. M. Meen's edutainment and English-learning aspects earned it one. Having ties to Simon & Schuster probably helped, too. Let's plug the game's ISBN number into a database and see if it has any extra data:

Well, this is interesting. The ISBN data for I. M. Meen is mostly intact, apart from its associated picture being changed to refer to The Magic Labyrinth by Philip Jose Farmer. More importantly, it reveals two release months! The first date is the obvious one - there's a May 1995 date in the "Published" section of the data. However, the title of the ISBN data lists an odd set of numbers - 010695. This appears to be a updated, tacked-on date, and while it could refer to either January or June 1995, it's more likely to be the June one from what's been noted so far. Neat!

For our next piece of evidence, we'll need to head over to CD-ROM Professional, an academic journal that went under multiple names (ending with EventDV) and ran from 1995 to 2012. The July 1995 issue of this journal has a blurb dedicated to promoting I. M. Meen:

The article that I. M. Meen appeared in was dedicated to highlighting titles that had been recently released, such as ECO: East Africa (which was a Viridis title, incidentally!) and the Mac version of Star Wars: Dark Forces. CD-ROM Professional was a monthly publication; this means that its contents and articles were most likely written in the month preceding its cover date. That would be between May and June 1995, depending on when its writing period happened...

(Also, I had to use my college's library database service in order to find this article, as well as start some (failed) searches for CD-i Nintendo news. Thank you, America's taxpayers!)

One more bit of evidence, and it's a bit more... shady than the other two. Like pretty much every computer game ever made, I. M. Meen was pirated upon release and was illegally shared through various distribution methods used for warez, especially CDs. The group behind this was called Dynamix, and they luckily added an info file to their release:

Well, would you look at that... May 21st, 1995, a day before the game's demo was finalized. While this seems like evidence towards a May release, it must be kept in mind that pirated copies of games were (and still are) leaked days or weeks before the release of the game. Just because the pirated copy released on that day doesn't mean the full game was. It still could have been released in June, though it's hard to tell without a definitive release date for the game.

So, for now, the game was released in either late May or in early June. Hey, at least it's a smaller timeframe than what I found for Animation Magic's Zelda games.

But wait - there are other releases of I. M. Meen too!

Oh, Right, The Rerelease Too

I. M. Meen was re-released around the time that Chill Manor came out, with a brand-new box (the right cover on the section's home page) and magazine ad (above) to promote it. As stated previously, Chill Manor was released in November 1996 according to its shareware demo's sell screen, so it's reasonable to assume that the re-release of I. M. Meen happened around that time. Do we have any evidence for this?

Well, this re-release was given a new ISBN number to differentiate it from the original release of I. M. Meen - 0-671-57585-6. Let's plug that in real quick:

Yep, that sure is I. M. Meen, and with unedited data to boot! It only has 1996 for its "Published" date, but checking the ISBN number on a different database reveals that it was published or added in October 1996. It fits the timeframe well and isn't contested by another month, so I'm inclined to say that this is when the re-release happened. Obviously, more evidence is needed to confirm it... but at least it's something to work with!

That was going to be the end of this page's research. However, in the middle of collecting research, I rediscovered a release of I. M. Meen that was completely forgotten about!

A Forgotten UK Release

In the initial stages of my "Meensearch", I took to Google's archive of newspapers and books to find any contemporary reviews or articles about I. M. Meen, much like I did with Animation Magic's Zelda games. While this didn't really go anywhere, I stumbled across a very fascinating entry in one of the books. Page 604 of The Multimedia and CD-ROM Directory from 1998 (and page 221 of NewMedia from 1999) had a listing for a United Kingdom release of I. M. Meen:

(Apologies for the small image - there was no full preview of the book available)

The listing had an inaccurate summary framing Gnorris for Meen's crimes, as well as what company published it; ABLAC Learning Works Ltd. From the single news article I could find on them, ABLAC appears to be an obscure edutainment software publisher that operated in the United Kingdom in the mid-1990s. They published several other US-made titles that, like I. M. Meen, were listed in those two books. A promising lead, but I needed more evidence to prove that it was legitimate and not just a mislabeled US release.

Luckily, a British magazine called CD-ROM Today came to my aid. In their September 1995 issue, the magazine reviewed I. M. Meen on Pages 42 and 43. The meat of the review consisted of a screenshot-filled flowchart and a (to put it bluntly) fucking bizarre fairy tale story about edutainment titles, but at the bottom-left corner of the second page was some pricing and publishing info:

And there's ABLAC! The article has some really solid proof of the United Kingdom release of I. M. Meen, though given that there's no images or dumps of this release, it's possible the release was cancelled. Given that CD-ROM Today was a monthly magazine, this gives a rough timeframe of August to December 1995 for this release's date. If you have more information about (or, better yet, a copy of) the ABLAC-published I. M. Meen, let me know!

It makes me wonder about the game releasing in other English-speaking countries... was I. M. Meen also released in Canada and Australia? Who knows.

The Release Dates As Of Writing

With my evidence presented, I conclude this research article by displaying - in big letters - the proper release dates for I. M. Meen:

Quite a lot of words for a game about reading scrolls and correcting grammar. I suppose that's fitting.