Y2.02K

So here we are in 2020, and almost everything is still working as normal. The apocalyptic Y2K bug that caused such a thrill 20 years ago found its sequel in Y2.02K, but rather than nuclear reactor shutdowns, oil pumping station failures and Hawaiian power cuts, all we got this time was a couple of poxy video games not running.

Indeed, it was a mundane dawn of a fresh decade for everyone but the gamers looking to play either Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order or WWE 2K20 in the early hours of New Year’s Day. While Downtime was scouring every takeaway app in existence to find somewhere that was open at 3am, they were busy tweaking their systems back to 31 December 2019 to trick their games into launching.

Time being a famously abstract human construct that no other creature on the planet observes, we saw the news of these systems being sent to 31 December 2019 as the perfect excuse to return ourselves to 26 December 2001, where we could be found tentatively altering our PlayStation 2’s internal clock back to 25 December 2001, just so we could carry on playing The Simpsons: Road Rage as Christmas Apu.

It felt like a taboo to toy with time then, but now we know it ultimately changes nothing. Happy New Year.