Weird Weekend is our regular Saturday column where we celebrate PC gaming oddities: peculiar games, strange bits of trivia, forgotten history. Pop back every weekend to find out what Jeremy, Josh and Rick have become obsessed with this time, whether it's the canon height of Thief's Garrett or that time someone in the Vatican pirated Football Manager.
In The Simpsons: Treehouse of Horror X segment 'Life's a Glitch, Then you Die', Homer fails to fix the Y2K problem in the computers of Springfield's Nuclear Power Plant, triggering the apocalypse. The segment features some of my favourite Simpsons gags, like Krusty's pacemaker getting stuck on hummingbird mode, and Homer's plaintive cry of "Oh no, Rosie O'Donnell!" inside the rocket ship full of B-listers as it cruises toward immolation in the sun.
Incredibly, Life's a Glitch is not the only work of fiction in which Homer's voice actor Dan Castellenetta grapples with the Y2K problem. There is another, and some might say more culturally significant, artwork featuring both the world's most famous voice actor and narrowly averted digital Armageddon. Ladies and gentlemen, let me introduce Y2K: The Game, the greatest and, indeed, only game specifically about the Millennium Bug ever made.
Why am I digging up this PC gaming fossil? Well, I've been thinking a lot about the Millennium bug lately. This is partly because I am 38 years old, and the idea of being 13 years old again grows more appealing with every passing day. But it's also because the Y2K problem represents a time when computer experts worked to save the world, rather than going out of their way to make it worse as today's tech magnates seem hellbent on doing.
Anyway, I was curious whether the tech anxieties of the late nineties had been addressed directly in video game form. Turns out the answer is "not really", but Y2K: The Game wins by default.
Y2K: The Game sees you play as Buster, a sentient white pudding squeezed into a university lecturer's jacket who, prior to the game's commencement, just so happens to have won the lottery. With his winnings, he buys a mansion which just so happens to have been owned by a recently deceased robotics genius, who just so happens to have filled his mansion with all manner of computer gizmos and talking automata. Oh, and Buster just so happens to move into his new digs on New Year's Eve, 1999.
Any story premise that involves this many layers of happenstance probably needs a rework, by which I mean setting fire to the script and starting again. But developer Runecraft sallies boldly forth with this bizarre jumble of nonsense. As Buster collapses onto his bed in a stupor induced by a $100 bottle of wine, the clock strikes midnight. Immediately, Buster's freshly acquired smart house loses 500 IQ points and turns evil. The game represents this through the computer's voice switching from a cool, detached HAL 9000 intonation to an aggressive caricature of a Noo Yoik dialect.
Your sole objective in Y2K is to patch out the Millennium Bug from the supercomputer that runs the house. The challenge in achieving this derives from the fact that Buster's house makes no sense whatsoever. Imagine if the island from Myst was lifted out of the ocean by a gigantic tsunami, then driven into the Spencer Mansion from Resident Evil at a speed so fast the two instantly fused together.
If you think I'm exaggerating, here's a brief rundown of spaces you can explore in Y2K: The Game.
- A room filled with ancient relics
- An elevator with the score for three blind mice etched into the wall, and elevator music that is not three-blind mice
- A dining room with three AI-powered stuffed animal heads who speak in British accents (including a rhinoceros referred to as 'The Colonel')
- A basement housing a recycling robot that gets so angry at Buster for not bringing trash for it to recycle that it tries to kill him (this robot also has a New York accent)
- A dungeon prowled by a murderous robotic executioner, which is somehow less aggressive than the recycling robot (accent not specified)
I will say that the pre-rendered backgrounds and robot animations are quite detailed for 1999, even if it is all wholly incoherent. Unfortunately, the thing you look at the most—Buster—is also the least visually appealing part in the game, a slouching, shuffling blob so offputtingly pasty he looks like he stepped out of a Softmints advert.
In fact, calling it "shuffling" is probably generous. Even if everything else about Y2K: The Game was brilliant, it would still be interminable simply because Buster is so. Goddamn. Slow. He's such a tortoise that, if a solution to a puzzle suddenly clicks into place for you, you should write it down, because there is a non-zero chance you will have forgotten it by the time Buster arrives at his destination.
There are two things I like about Y2K: The Game, the first is, obviously, the voice acting. Castellaneta puts the effort in, and he isn't the only heavy-hitting voice actor in Y2K either. Candace is played by Grey DeLisle—only a year into her career at this point—with other actors including Danny Mann and John Mariano. Unfortunately, they are all let down by a weak script riddled with non-liners such as "I'm glad I'm smart enough to use the extension cord" and "Like Candace says, you'll never know when you'll need some batteries!"
Comfortably the best thing in the game, though, is the music. Every room has its own specific theme, each of which is so much more artistically accomplished than anything contained in the room itself. The antiques room, for example, is accompanied by a sitar-led melody that's quintessentially adventure game. One corridor theme wouldn't be out of place on a Pure Moods CD, while Corridor 3 starts like Laura Palmer's theme and slides into some Tangerine Dream. And then there's the music for the dining room, which could happily accompany a boss fight in a Souls game. I repeat, this is for a dining room.
Even the elevator music sucks in exactly the way elevator music is supposed to suck. I was going to suggest that composers Craig Beattie and Matt Sugden deserve more credit for their work here. But to be honest, what they really deserve is for Y2K: The Game to be much better than it actually is.
At the same time, it's hard to get mad at Y2K. It completely wastes its premise, but it's so absurd and goofy that it stumbles inadvertently into being oddly charming. It's also short enough that even Buster's ponderous gait doesn't extend the running time that much.
It also makes me wonder what the developers of today would do with the Y2K premise if it was in any way marketable. I imagine we'd end up with some kind of Sam Barlow-esque detective game where you're chasing the bug through a labyrinth of computer files, stumbling upon narratively enlightening notes and documents as you go. It's either that or a hero shooter. This is the games industry, after all.
