Why Do Games Launch on Tuesdays?

Football Mogul 19 will launch on Tuesday, September 4th — two days before the start of the NFL season. I'll be posting more info about Football Mogul over the next two weeks. But if you've ever wondered why videogames launch on Tuesdays, you can thank Sonic the Hedgehog.

Back before I was writing computer games for a living, there were two anthropomorphic animals named Sonic and Tails. And when two anthopomorphic animals love each other very much, they make a videogame. Sonic the Hedgehog launched in 1991 on the new Sega Genesis (and it was awesome!). But in 1992, Sega was still getting its butt kicked by Nintendo. So the geniuses at Sega invented "Sonic 2sday" in order to build buzz around Sonic The Hedgehog: 2.

In the 1980s, the Japan-based Nintendo had pioneered the pattern of launching in Japan before moving on to Europe and North America. But Sega's marketing team (Project Manager Madeline Schroder and Marketing Director Al Nilsen) decided to shake things up with the industry's "first global launch". As a pun using the number '2', they declared a unified worldwide launch date on Tuesday, November 24, 1992 and named it "Sonic 2sday".

Sonic 2sday was a huge success that reverberated through videogames and even spread to CDs and DVDs. As it turned out, Tuesday was a perfect launch day. Game makers who had traditionally launched on Friday were disappointed by their rankings in first-week sales, so they launch dates started creeping all the way back to Monday for some games. However, there was some pushback form retail partners who didn't want to pay overtime for employees to stock shelves every Sunday night. Sonic and Tails planted the flag on Tuesday and its still there today.