For those too young to remember, the Year 2000 Problem, also known as the Y2K scare, was a brief, glorious bit of chaos enjoyed in the late 90s when fears of a catastrophic computing apocalypse were rampant, a total collapse predicted because of differences in dating systems. We got to relive some of that magic today, as publishers EA and Square Enix were caught wrong-footed by the extra day in February, leading games from both to be temporarily rendered inoperable.
Fans of EA's Sports WRC could not boot up the game on the 29th due to a timezone issue, which was quickly rectified but required players to set their system setting forward a day to function. Meanwhile, Square Enix has its hands full, although the issue only appears to be affecting players on Nintendo and not PlayStation; the price of launching Final Fantasy VII Rebirth was Theatrythm Final Bar Line not booting up, apparently,
These issues already appear to be resolved from what we can see, but it shows how the little things can catch you when you least expect it. Did you have any Leap Year-related scheduling conflicts? Let us know in the comments section below.
[source twitter.com, via ign.com]
Comments 4
Very unfortunate for both games. Had my eye on WRC 2023, good to know.
Why do we need online checks/online games. It's hilarious. Sure it's one day and we have online updates that can be worked out but like seriously.
Accounting for leap years is a very rare thing but odd they never thought about it.
Even a message of the day or other things people would surely let alone a clock app/calendar.
Leaderboards, server connection timestamps, other things.
Well for offline wouldn't matter right only online services the date?
Or whatever it uses dates for that it messed up as, for trophy or online lobby checks sure but otherwise not sure.
But start up that's unfortunate.
Leap years strike and Y2K date like issues strike again.
Well at least we aren't in the alter 20xx I forget the year it is that the next Y2K bug will happen in the future. It's what 2036 or something or 2060 something? I can't remember.
Probably the 10,000 people who got fired from gaming companies last year were in charge of making sure stuff like this doesn't happen.😝
You can’t compare Y2K to February 29th😂. Y2K was dates store using 2 digit years, so 00 to save memory/storage in olden times) and code not knowing if the date was 1900 or 2000 (so a lot of potential date calculation issues). Pretty much every coder spent the previous 5 or so years (at least) looking out and fixing those issues (which is why it was just a media flap in general).
February 29th comes round every 4 years! That’s just bad coding! Sorry, grampa rant over
Not as bad as Toy Soldiers War Chest where you have to reboot your console in offline mode & change the date to 1/1/2015. otherwise the game wont start from the menu
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