PlayStation 3 owners awoke to a nasty surprise Monday as they discovered a bug in the system’s internal clock which prevented the consoles from going online. The bug was triggered at midnight on March 1 and affected the “fat” model PlayStation 3s. As reported by news outlets and individuals on Twitter, the problem was worldwide, although the newer, “slim” models were unaffected.
Dubbed “The ApocalyPS3” by gamers on Twitter and popular gaming forums, the bug was causing the system date to reset to Jan. 1, 2000. Then, when the console would attempt to log onto the network, the following message would display: “An error has occurred. You have been signed out of PlayStation Network (8001050F).” Being locked out of the network is one thing, but making matters much worse was that any game which featured “trophies” would not boot, including the single-player-only “Heavy Rain,” one of the PlayStation 3’s most anticipated games of 2010 which had very recently been released. Because the consoles couldn’t check for unlocked “trophies” — awards granted players for meeting certain challenges within the game — they would simply refuse to boot the games. Shockingly enough, there was no way around this; no “offline” mode, no update, nothing that could be done but to sit tight and wait for Sony to do something about it. By Monday afternoon, Sony had taken care of the problem and, save for some lost trophy data, everything was set as it should be.
There are a number of things about this story that leave me concerned, however. For instance, did Sony know about the clock problem when it switched to the new architecture? Remember, the newer, slim models were unaffected. If they were conscious of the issue enough to fix it when building the new consoles, why not patch the older models before it became a problem? This whole mess might have been prevented from happening in the first place.
Also, what did Sony expect people who don’t have an Internet connection to do when the consoles went looking for trophy data online and couldn’t find it? Obviously, there’s something fundamentally wrong with the way Sony deals with online connectivity. Most gamers who would buy a PlayStation 3 probably have a decent broadband connection available, but requiring a connection for a single-player game is unreasonable and foolish.
I don’t mean to exclusively bash Sony, especially when Microsoft has its hands full with its own set of ongoing problems with the Xbox 360. To its credit, Sony did take care of the problem in a timely manner. All said and done, I’ll be the first to admit that I actually love this generation of gaming consoles. They certainly have a lot of problems, and it’s easy to poke fun and say things like, “Back in my day, we just blew into the cartridges if they didn’t work,” but we’re seeing and doing things we only dreamed about a few years ago. An unfortunate side effect to the increased ability of current hardware also means increased complexity, to the point where a simple, silly little problem like figuring out whether this is a leap year or not is enough to bring an entire network to its knees. It seems so basic a problem that it’s something that should have never come up, but the more complicated a system, the more vulnerable it becomes. Consider that the next time you come down with the flu, an infectious disease caused by the simplest of all life forms: the virus.
Sure, we could play it safe; we could stop gambling on new technologies and experimenting with new ideas, but if we did that we’d still be playing “Pong” on black-and-white, 13-imch televisions. No, thanks. Give me HD graphics, wireless controllers and a friends list of people from around the world any day. I think it’s worth the risk.
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