Link: The Faces of Evil - Release Date Investigation

October 10th, 1993.
That is the release date associated with the US release of Link: The Faces of Evil and Zelda: The Wand of Gamelon. It's a release month/day they share with esteemed gaming events such as The Orange Box and that release party of Doom II that everyone thinks is the actual release date of the game and not September 30th. In addition, it's associated with a December 25th, 1993 release date in Europe.

This date appeared on the Internet one fine day, and everyone assumed it was real without actually checking. Until now. I've went through multiple contemporary sources regarding the CD-i and the Animation Magic Zelda games, much like my debunking of the Hotel Mario and Zelda's Adventure release dates, and I've come to a conclusion:

The evidence I currently have does NOT rule that date out. As a matter of fact, it lines up rather well! (But you'll have to stick to the end for that.)

Sections:

File Date Checkup -- A Lack of Magazine Coverage -- Newspaper Clues -- Deep Into The Magazines -- The Release Window As Of Writing

File Date Checkup

As per the other games, my first step was doing a general file date checkup on the disc. If the release date was older than the last updated file, then something funny was going on. 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 (SPOILER). This is handy as it both points to when a specific game went gold and disproves any "release date" that occurred before it."

So, what's up with Link: The Faces of Evil?

There's... quite a bit to unpack here. First off, those file dates for the German and Dutch versions are rather late in the year. While a 1993 release date IS possible with them, there's also a chance they were pushed back to early 1994 to allow for proper publishing. The French file dates makes it the most likely dub to be released in 1993, but it's also possible that it was the first dub to be completed and had its release delayed until the others were done. We'll have to come back to this later.

Most importantly, the English version (used for both the US and Europe) is dated before both of the online release dates, which doesn't help much with the investigation. It might be a hint that the two regions got Link: The Faces of Evil around the same time, but that's about it...
Still, it's a start. We have a lower boundary to work with, and that's better than nothing. Onto the magazine coverage!

And here's where we run into a problem.

A Lack of Magazine Coverage

For the first couple years of its lifespan, the CD-i was not a popular console; its less-than-stellar lineup ensured that there was little coverage of it from both gaming and electronics magazines. Things started picking up when the console got an actual game library, which only really started around 1994. By then, both the Digital Video Cartridge and the Animation Magic Zelda games had been released.
Do you see the problem here?

Because of a lack of CD-i coverage before 1994, there's also a lack of Animation Magic Zelda coverage around the time of its release. The only related announcement that magazines actually picked up on was the CD-i/Nintendo collaboration, which didn't give any release dates for its titles. This isn't good... are there any publications that bothered to give the games a release window??

Well, after some deep scouring, I was able to find four mentions of Link: The Faces of Evil's release from magazine and magazine-adjacent publications. Thank goodness! Let's start with two from the magazine Electronic Games:

The first relevant mention is in the September 1993 issue. In a section about the CD-i's upcoming titles, it notes that "revamped versions of Nintendo's Link games" are one of them. Remember, monthly magazines are written in the month before their cover date - therefore, this was likely written in August. The second mention comes in the December 1993 issue, where it states that the Animation Magic Zelda games were released in the fall. Fall happens from September 1st or 22nd to either November 30th or December 21st, depending on what system you use. We can safely eliminate the December date due to the aforementioned cover date rule.

That's great! This one magazine helps narrow down the search to Fall 1993, between September 1st and November 30th. For fun, let's check out the two other sources and see what they have to say.

The next mention comes from the November 1993 issue of EGM, where they had a preview of Link: The Faces of Evil. They give an "Unknown" release date for the game, which is a bit weird. Assuming the article was written in October, the game should've been close to coming out or was already out by the time it was written. You'd think Philips would've told them the release date, right? The EGM preview does cast doubt on the October 10th, 1993 date, but it's too ambiguous to say for certain.

Finally, we have this lovely advertisement for the Philips CD-i on the Electronics Boutique Christmas 1993 catalog - on the second page, no less! Among its featured titles are Link: The Faces of Evil and Zelda: The Wand of Gamelon, using their early game blurbs too!! Radical!!!

This advertisement for the CD-i appears to be part of a Christmas 1993 push by Philips to popularize the console in the United States. Apart from the catalog, it was featured in a Macy's "Power Weekend" sale, as well as a Sears newspaper ad campaign spanning several cities across several states. Back to the catalog - it was published in December, and the previous Electronics Boutique catalog was in October and did not feature the CD-i or the Animation Magic Zelda games. Assuming they follow the cover date rules, this gives a rough timeframe of the Christmas catalog (and CD-i section) being written from late September to late November. It's nice to have some confirmation for the range I inferred from Electronic Games' issues.

But can we do better? I think we can... but we'll need to dive into those old newspapers I pulled those pages out of.

Newspaper Clues

Now, the issue with doing online old newspaper digging is that, like, half of them are archived by the Ancestry.com conglomerate, and they charge you to view their archives in full. Fortunately, the other (like) half is archived by Google, which is a conglomerate that does NOT charge you to view them. For the purposes of this section, that's good.

Another issue is that the scans aren't so great, and this leads to text transcription errors. Furthermore, if the text is small enough, it'll be blurry and unable to be picked up by a word search. So, in what amounted to about five hours of searching every relatable term I could think of, I was only able to find two mentions of Link: The Faces of Evil between the late September and late November timeframe.

The first one is dated November 11th, 1993, and comes from Page 4A of the Florence, Alabama newspaper "Times Daily". It's essentially an advertisement for the CD-i at the furniture store Story & Lee. Among the discs labeled as being in stock are Link: The Faces of Evil and Zelda: The Wand of Gamelon. It's very obvious that, by this point, the Animation Magic Zelda games had hit retail. We can narrow down the latest date they were available to November 11th, 1993.

The second one is dated October 15th, 1993, and comes from an advertisement bundled with the Sarasota, Florida newspaper "Sarasota Herald-Tribune". In an advertisment detailing a Home Electronics Expo at the defunct furniture store chain Roberds, the Philips CD-i is promoted with "Zelda & Link" as a featured attraction. The thing here is that it doesn't actually specify if the games were available for sale at the expo, or if the two games were demonstrations only. And I doubt anyone remembers if they bought a Philips CD-i with the Zelda games from this specific expo.
At the very least, stores were using Link: The Faces of Evil and Zelda: The Wand of Gamelon to promote the CD-i by October 15th.

I originally ended this page here, with a late-September to November 11th range for the US release and early 1994 timeframes for the European releases. However, I decided to look through more gaming magazines, and, well...

Deep Into The Magazines

There are three magazines in particular that I'd like to talk about and share information from. First, let's head into the UK and check out Haymarket's CD-i-focused magazine... er, CD-i. In the second issue of the magazine, dated October 1993, were reviews for The Faces of Evil and The Wand of Gamelon. Both games had a single page to themselves (Pg. 24 and 25), and also had a release period in their scores section.
Here's the one for The Faces of Evil:

As you can see, the game was given a release period of "Now". This suggests that the writers knew that, when the issue would be released, the two games were going to be available in-stores. Furthermore, the forthcoming titles section (located at the very end of the issue and covering November/December 1993) does not have either Animation Magic Zelda title in it. This confirms that the two games were NOT released in those months in the United Kingdom.

For more information, we turn to a Dixons ad elsewhere in the magazine, which lists both titles for sale. That same ad also notes that certain feature films were being released for the CD-i in mid-October. Therefore, the two games were out before mid-October in the UK.

There is a bit of wiggle room, though; because the first issue of the magazine hasn't been archived, we don't know the exact day in which the second issue was published. (Y'see, each issue of Haymarket's CD-i magazine has the publishing date of the next issue near the end of the current issue.) It's entirely possible that the issue was super early in the month, and that the titles were actually released in late September!
However, given the rest of the evidence on this page, I believe that the United Kingdom got Link: The Faces of Evil in early October 1993.

This fits in well with the US release period of The Faces of Evil. Incidentally, some English CD-i titles were released around the same time in both the USA and UK. For example, The Apprentice was released in both countries in November 1994, and the canned US release of Zelda's Adventure was in the same quarter as its UK release.
While there's nothing directly confirming it, I believe that the US release of the Link: The Faces of Evil happened around the time as its UK release.

The next magazine would be the French publication Joystick. Issue #44, dated December 1993, featured a review of Link: The Faces of Evil on Page 192. The previous issue, Issue #43 (November 1993), had a full-page advertisement for both Animation Magic Zelda games on Page 197. These two being in back-to-back issues indicates that the French version of Link: The Faces of Evil was released at the end of 1993, though whether the month was November or December is unknown. It could've still been an early 1994 release, but that possibility is less likely now.

Lastly, let's check out the Dutch gaming magazine Power Unlimited. On Page 56/57 of Issue #4, dated November 1993, were reviews for both of Animation Magic's Zelda games. While the game don't have a release date, the fact that they're being reviewed now and have prices listed in guilder suggests that they were available for purchase in the Netherlands in 1993, potentially in November or December.
This is probably the weakest evidence from the three magazines... but we ARE working with scraps and shards here. Gotta take what we can get.

Now, what about the German version? Unfortunately, I could find no contemporary magazine that covered the German release of Link: The Faces of Evil. Given the internal file dates and what happened with the French/Dutch releases, though, I'd say that it was also released in the November/December timeframe. This, obviously, is an educated guess that requires more evidence than what I currently have. But it's all I've got.

The Release Window As Of Writing

With my findings, I will now display the most likely periods in which Link: The Faces of Evil released:

If you've made it this far, thank you for reading my unhinged CD-i release date ramblings! What this page needs more than anything are contemporary reviews and evidence of the game's true release date.
Especially those dubbed releases.
If you have either/or, let me know as soon as possible. I'd love to crack this 30-years-old case.