We are in 2003. The Lord of the Rings delivers his Return of the King, the legend of Jack Sparrow is born, Evanescence sounds on the radio, and it seems that the music will no longer be the same after the arrival of iTunes. For your part, you play Pokémon Ruby or Pokémon Sapphire oblivious to the inevitable problem that is about to explode.
There are still two or three years left for the new generation of consoles to standardize playing online from the comfort of your home and, although in the PC world they are one step ahead, Wi-Fi connectivity that would save the problem of Nintendo in the most comfortable way possible is far from being common.
An unexpected error
After the launch of the third generation of Pokémon, in Japan they are full with the arrival of Mudkip, Torchic and Treecko, but they are about to run into a problem that would have been impossible to find by the testers. On November 22, 2003, 366 days later that the first release copies begin their particular adventure through Hoenn, time will stop.
No, it is not that from that point on they will be able to enjoy every second of the game as if it were hours, it is that time will literally stop. Tides that changed to allow access to caves will no longer rise or fall, events that deliver gifts will no longer do so, day or night will remain unchanged, and planted berries will stop growing.
This last phenomenon will be precisely the one that will give name to the error, known from then on as the Berry Glitch as this is the easiest way to detect the problem. What should be one of the main assets of that new installment, a year later would become his biggest problem.
How could something like this happen
That the testers could not find the error before manufacturing and putting the cartridges on sale seems obvious, but what the hell had happened so that the time within the game stopped? The key is in the cartridge itself and the real time clock which you use to handle all those events mentioned above.
When the clock is turned on for the first time when starting the game, the date it marks is January 1, 2000, and from there it modifies the format of days and years to transform it into a number of days, specifically 366 of the year 2000. for being leap.
The error occurs when jumping to the following year, where looking for a day 367 that continues the series, the game returns to day 1 and understands that there has been a internal clock error cartridge and indicates that it is exhausted. Although the game can continue to function normally, the related events will stop occurring until the internal clock returns one full revolution. Or what is the same, after passing one year in real time.
Nintendo’s solution
What for the Nintendo DS will already be something relatively common a few years later, for the Game Boy Advance it is still something of the future, so Nintendo she is forced to look for an alternative solution. You need to patch the game at a time when such a move is unusual.
The first solution, in addition to solving the error in future cartridges, seems the simplest: that the players go to a store where the patch can be provided and be given a gift Pokemon shiny. Those who could not appear in a store could send the cartridge to Nintendo to have it fixed. A solution that, by the way, was active until 2012.
However, that did not solve the whole problem and, in order to anticipate a wave of shipments, or the problems generated by a huge number of users who would not know what the hell was going on with their game, they decided to take an even smarter measure: use the saga as a Troy Horse.
The Pokémon Trojan Horse
If one of the keys to Pokemon is connectivity with other players and other games, the time had come to take advantage of that functionality for more than just moving bugs from one console to another. Now patches would also be moved that would solve the problem.
Pokémon Colosseum, Pokémon Channel, Pokémon Box, Pokémon XD… If you connected your Game Boy Advance to the GameCube and you had one of those games, the patch was installed automatically. The same would happen later if you traded Pokémon with the editions Emerald, Red fire or Green leaf.
Automatically, or forced from the home screen of those games, Nintendo it even included the patch on a demo disc, making it one of the most creative and well-executed solutions in the industry. A play so well timed that, by Trojan horse, it may have fixed your game before it even knew there was a problem.