I have something to contribute that may shed some light on how SNES games were released.
I've been fiddling around a bit with a hex editor on a game called
Mr. Nutz for the SNES. This game has four versions: USA, PAL E, JAP, and what seems to be an NTSC BETA. Interestingly, each version of Mr. Nutz contains dummied text in ASCII at the very beginning of the ROM. Each version's text contains contact information, however, two of the versions (USA and JAP) also has information regarding when it was created and what version it was:
USA: "
NTSC version 11 jan 94 - MR NUTZ produced by Pierre ADANE & Philippe DESSOLY. If you want to contact us then write to: Pierre ADANE - BP 67 - 94242 l'Hay les roses cedex - France"
JAP: "
NTSC version 20 june 94 - MR NUTZ produced by Pierre ADANE & Philippe DESSOLY. If you want to contact us then write to: Pierre ADANE - BP 67 - 94242 l'Hay les roses cedex - France"
*The other two versions contain the same text, except what's in bold.*
*The word 'version' may be referring to it being the NTSC version or version 11/20. If the latter, than that would be rather strange, but I doubt it; it probably refers to the day of the month it was created.*
*The title screen for the different versions show the dates as 1993 for the PAL E and BETA, and 1994 for the USA and JAP.*
According to GameFAQ's (
http://www.gamefaqs.com/console/snes/data/588503.html) it lists the release dates for the USA and PAL versions as 1994 (which contradicts the PAL version's in-game release date), but it interestingly gives an exact date for the JAP version, 10/07/94, which contradicts what the dummied text at the beginning of the ROM says.
Of course, I'm only basing this off of what GameFAQ's says... I haven't looked around the internet to see if other sites have different release dates for this game's different regional releases. But if GameFAQs' release dates are correct, it may explain why the real "creation dates" of some games don't fit with the actual release dates. The BETA being an NTSC may bolster my earlier theory that developers will try to create a game in that format first.
However, the one thing that doesn't fit with DKC is that Mr. Nutz' PAL version appears to have actually been created before the USA version, whereas DKC is the other way around. I can't think of any way of explaining this, but it's possible that the company that made Mr. Nutz originally planned the game to be released exclusively in Europe, but decided to release it in America as well, due to the BETA being NTSC anyway, they wouldn't have to go through that much effort to 'convert' it for an American audience. Oddly enough, there are some other PAL-exclusive games, such as
Daze Before Christmas by Funcom, which was never released outside of Europe. Not sure if Funcom is a European company like Rare and Mr. Nutz' creators.