Tribes 2 delayed by Y2K AI

Dynamix today announced the real reason behind the hold put on the Tribes 2 beta late last year. While the first beta was being rolled out, members of the development team discovered a Y2K bug in the artificial intelligence, or "bot," code.

Tribes 2 producer Dave Georgeson told Tribal Fear News that the bots have been designed to give players stiff competition. "You've gotta have good bots. So we built them to learn and adapt. To make life difficult. Unfortunately, they were supposed to make the players' lives difficult, not ours."

Apparently, the bots learned too much and adapted too well. Modifying their own code to take advantage of the true millennium, the bots were prepared to wreak havoc on the game. "If we hadn't caught their changes, every player's armor would think it was 1901, causing the jump jets to fail. You'd be sitting ducks for those bots," said lead developer Mark Frohnmayer, shaking his head. "It would've been a bloodbath."

Tribal Fear News asked Georgeson if the bots could still cause problems once they get on a large number of peoples' computers and are exposed to Napster, instant messaging, and pr0n. "Oh no, we've learned our lesson now," replied Georgeson. "We've lobotomized the bots and totally restricted their access beyond the game boundary. We don't need bots that make 'naked Britney Spears' skins and order stuff off Amazon.com, now do we?"