Posts from when did the 3 heroes appear? Auto-translated

Hello everyone!
I was watching a Hellight stream the other day.
And I noticed that there was a lively discussion when someone started playing Heroes of Might and Magic III.
One of the participants strongly adhered to the official version:
Heroes of Might and Magic III was released in 1999, and it appeared in Russia in 2000.

The other participants claimed that they were actively playing it in 1998 and 1999.
Actually, as a long-time fan of this game, I actively played the second version, and as soon as the third version appeared, I bought it as soon as I could. That's just my personal experience. I decided to Google for official information.
And what do we see? Wikipedia
"The game was developed by New World Computing and published by The 3DO Company on February 28, 1999. The Russian localization of Heroes of Might and Magic III was done by the company "Buka," which released the Russian version of the game on March 15, 2000, under the title "Heroes of Might and Magic III: The Restoration of Erathia" (quoted).

Hmm... it was a long time ago, I might be wrong, but it seems that it was actually 1998...

I would still like to clarify the situation; if anyone remembers, please respond.

As far as I remember, at that time, the economic situation in the country was not much different from what is happening now in Ukraine. There was a semi-anarchic system of government.
No one had licensed products, not at all. But the information on Wikipedia tells us that such products did exist. Pirated versions, however, were released half a year or a year before the official version.

It was even funny when everyone was tired of a game or movie, and then BAM!!! they announced the official release of the product.

Well, here we are. Now we're guessing what year the game was released. :D
As far as I remember, the date 02/28/99 was mentioned everywhere.

Hello Kostya! This is the official release date. I would still like to hear from those who started playing back then. To get information from the source, so to speak. The official version often does not correspond to reality or what is commonly known.

Maybe they were just playing the alpha builds? Like, testers? From '98.

By the way, I played passively in the second and third installments later on. Through Capitol, and all that. Passively, in general. Don't judge, after all, we have a European forum here.

I played it in 2000, in the spring. On someone else's computer. Then, many years later, I got hooked on it again.

I also got to play it for the first time in 2000; my friend always had the latest games, and he got me hooked on Heroes.