Resurrected racer The Crew Unlimited swerves to avoid yet another death, as its curators issue ‘one of the most important updates we’ve ever released’

Open world online racer The Crew was recently resurrected by a team of enthusiast developers after its original developer Ubisoft wrote it off last year. But it turns out The Crew Unlimited was on course to return to the scrapyard relatively soon, had its new pit crew not nixed a peculiar bug that recalls the most infamous computer glitch of the 20th century.

In a post on The Crew Unlimited’s website (via RPS), Crew curator whammy4 details what they describe as “one of the most important updates we’ve ever released.” Whammy4 explains that, not long after TCU’s launch in September, the team realised that “if your PC date is set to post June 2029 … The Crew stops working.”

Why anyone would have their PC’s date set to beyond June 2029 is beyond me, so I’m not going to call the situation urgent, exactly. But the presence of such a bug will obviously become a much bigger problem in about three-and-a-half years’ time. Naturally, The Crew’s saviours were “extremely concerned” for the long-term health of the game, and investigated further:

“At first we were hoping that it was just a bug on the TCU Server’s end,” by which whammy4 means the server created by the TCU team to get the game running again. “But that turned out not to be the case. It is an issue within the actual game client itself, and is not intentional but rather a bug.”

The team has narrowed the problem down to one of two features introduced in different updates to The Crew, namely the Summit calendar system added in 2015’s Wild Run update, or the daily Crate mission system from the Calling All Units update released the following year. “[The] likely culprit is the Summit,” Whammy4 declares. “Even though nothing in the summit calendar date references anything about a June 2029 or 2029 in general.”

While the TCU team is unable to do anything about the bug itself for now, they have successfully implemented a “less than ideal but working fix for the Crew’s third imminent death” via the actual TCU server. They’ve dubbed this the “Y29K” fix, after the famous Millennium Bug which, contrary to what a lot of people believe today, was a huge threat to global computer systems that cost vast amounts of money and effort to solve.

Alongside the major fix, the patch addresses a couple of other problems with The Crew Unlimited. It fixes an issue where police cars were being treated as regular cars when claiming free starter kits (heaven forbid the police should be given the same treatment as regular civilians) while also improving “reward picking logic” for CAU Crate Fragments and Bucks.

The Crew has, strangely, proved a much more significant game in its death and resurrection than it ever did in its life. Its demise at the hands of Ubisoft was one of the primary catalysts of the Stop Killing Games campaign. What began as an online call to action has since been debated in the UK Parliament and become an EU initiative, the latter of which looks increasingly likely to proceed to the European commission, as the vast majority of its signatures have been verified so far.