Regarding your guess of October 31st, there's a problem with going with that as the avaliability date. What the copyright database states is when it was first made available for public consumption. This can be off-press date, your shipping date, or your actual publication date (i.e. available for purchase). We have no way of knowing which was intended and normally in video games you want to get the copyright done as early in the process as possible. So I'm inclined to believe Oct. 31st is the off-press date (same with the slightly earlier date for the box). Additionally it's still just the date given for the manual not the entire product. As shown by the earlier box publication date and the discussion about the chip manufacturing (42nd week of the year 1985 would be the final week of October), it simply shows a timeline of when the reources for the finished product were being produced. Not their assembly (as a single finished product), not their shipping and distribution, and not the selling of the finished product. In the end, we're still left with the only form of evidence for public availability (i.e. sales) that doesn't require any sort of interpretation being the Macy's launch.
Yes, after writing up the article, I have to admit that Oct. 31st is on the far side of "early" - but some point between Oct. 31st and November 30th seems to be the likely period. I wonder if anyone at NCL would know the answer to this - they were the ones producing the cartridges, after all.
The other problem, of course, is that even with the Macy's ad isn't "proof" of the availability of the title -- it's just proof that the title was expected to be available. I'd love to find someone with a receipt... there have to be some October '85 NES owners out there, somewhere.
I'd also love a full image of the ROB marketing display.
(What's interesting, by the way, is that I wasn't aware of the bulk of the research going on over at Wikipedia until I was nearly done with my own research over here. It might have saved me a lot of time in the archives...)
Oh, it's also worth mentioning for anyone interested that I tried to avoid giving a specific date in the article - I end by giving four possible release dates/periods, and admit my bias towards something close to October 31st. More evidence seems to point to mid November, though.
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