Irony Reigns As 'WWE 2K20' Is Unplayable In The Year 2020

Back in October, I wrote about the ways in which the new WWE video game, WWE 2K20, was a nightmarish glitch hellscape. From minor graphical errors that would randomly turn people into skeletons to disturbing tears in reality that would reduce characters to quivering piles of geometry meat that can haunt your dreams for weeks, the glitches players experience upon release ran the gamut of everything that could possibly go wrong with a game. Eventually, patches were released, and the game stabilized. But one tiny problem remained that no one, not even as developers, could have foreseen: the game with "2K20" in the title experienced a Y2K-style bug that rendered it unplayable at the stroke of midnight of the year 2K20.

Video games are just millions of lines of code. A misplaced character here or an incorrect value there can throw off entire in-game systems. All it took to break the game whenever you try to open one of its modes was a little bit of code (that's already been patched by publishing time) that told the game to self-destruct at the stroke of midnight on New Year's Day. Some might call this a hilarious and poignant mistake. I call it incredible foresight.

This is a conspiracy theory that I'm inventing right now, but in my heart, I feel like the line of code responsible for the WWE2K apocalypse was not errantly placed. That it's actually planned obsolescence, a timebomb, if you will, buried deep within the game's code by one of its developers who just wanted to end all of this madness already. Their precious creation was limping along, wheezing and choking with every step, all but begging for a swift and painless death to end its suffering. This conflicted developer ultimately knew ending its life on an ironic but poignant note was the right thing to do. Video game euthanasia is humane, and it's time to open a national dialogue about killing off the bad ones.

Luis can be found on Twitter and Facebook. Check out his regular contributions to Macaulay Culkin's BunnyEars.com. Check out his "Meditation Minute" segments on the Bunny Ears podcast. And now you can listen to the first episode on Youtube!