“Digital purchases are mysteriously expiring on classic PlayStation consoles,” Kotaku reports, “rendering a random assortment of games unplayable.”
The glitch is “affecting users’ ability to play games they ostensibly own.”
Upon re-downloading the PSOne Classic version of Chrono Cross, for instance, Twitter user Christopher Foose was told the purchase expired on December 31, 1969, preventing him from playing the game on both PlayStation 3 and PlayStation Vita. GamesHub editor Edmond Tran described a similar issue. Trying to boot up Chrono Cross on PlayStation 3, Tran said, gave him the same expiration date and time, only adjusted for his location in Australia. Tran did mention, however, that he was able to download the PSOne Classic from his library and play just fine on Vita despite the game’s apparent delisting from the handheld’s store.
While at first this felt like an attempt at encouraging Chrono Cross fans to purchase the new Radical Dreamers remaster, Kotaku quickly found evidence of this same problem occurring with different games. Chrono Cross worked just fine for content creator Words, but not its spiritual predecessor Chrono Trigger, the license for which somehow lapsed 40 years before the game was added to the PSOne Classic library.
Steve J over on Twitter asked PlayStation directly why the expiration date for his copy of Final Fantasy VI was changed to 1969, but never received a response….
The only potential explanation I’ve seen for this issue thus far involves what’s known as the “Unix epoch,” or the arbitrary date early engineers designated as the beginning of the operating system’s lifespan. Some bug or glitch on Sony’s backend may be defaulting PlayStation game license expiration dates to the Unix epoch, essentially telling them they can’t be played after midnight UTC on January 1, 1970.
