On January 29, 2009, many gamers were shut out of their Gears of War worlds, the error being due to a piece of security software intended on giving the boot to illegal users. Epic Games had posted a reply saying that they were aware of the problem and working to fix it. Mark Rein, VP of Epic Games has issued an apology along with an explanation.
“The online cheat detection features in Gears of War for Windows are based on digital signatures,”” Mark Rein said. “Well, we made an embarrassing mistake: we signed the executable with a certificate that expired in a way that broke the game.”
He continued, “We’re working with Microsoft to re-sign the binaries properly, and hope to have this fixed very soon. We know how much this situation sucks, and we apologize for the inconvenience.”
Rein asks Gears of War PC players to bear with the inconvenience a little longer and turn their PC clocks back in order to play Gears of War until the situation is resolved.