It seems that symbolic release dates are all the rage right now. Beatles: Rock Band is due to be released on 09/09/09, which besides being easy to remember and aesthetically pleasing, I’ve since learned refers to one of their freakier experimental tracks (I hadn’t heard this before being tipped off to it, and afterwards concluded that I hadn’t been missing anything).
Modern Warfare 2 has tried to get in on the act too, releasing on 10th November 2009, which in US date format translates to 11/10/09 – so almost a nice countdown idiom, although who starts counting down from 11? Besides Spinal Tap that is. They really should have done this in 2008 instead (10/09/08). Of course, unlike the Beatles game, neither really works in an international context; here for example the release date is 10/11/09, losing all symbolic relevance due to our dd/mm/yy convention. Which, I have to say, is entirely more logical, since the denominations of time increase from left to right rather than jumping erratically about the place 
What other date-related shenanigans can we expect in 2010 I wonder? Surely an Arthur C. Clarke tie-in is unavoidable?
May 26th, 2009 at 4:56 pm
Indeed! In 2015 we are supposed to have hoverboards and flying cars too… but I guess Doc Brown must have messed something up somewhen.
May 26th, 2009 at 10:29 pm
I suggest to release Cthugha on your birthday.
mmm… bad idea. You don’t want thousands of user feedback (bugs) on your birthday (who would?), or spend your entire day staring at the compiler to find out the Mac/Linux/Win port is broken, and wishing while blowing out the candle that someone from the community will fix it for you.
Pick up a number instead which makes reference to the Cthulhu Mythos and use it as a deadline.
May 26th, 2009 at 11:54 pm
I agree that day/month/year makes more sense than the weird mixing of course / fine / coarser convention of the US month/day/year. That said, both are significantly inferior to year/month/day, as it offers both perfect alpha numeric sorting and is easier for the brain to mentally assimilate, since humans tend to prefer parsing data in a broad first / narrow later order.
Plus, it’s the international standard for dates:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601
To hell with both systems I say!
May 27th, 2009 at 2:12 am
Got distracted by the extremely silly inability to come to an international date standard and forgot to mention just how excited I am for Modern Warfare 2. Infinity Ward did a bang up job with the first one and if 2 is half as good I’ll probably still love it.
I still find it funny that they’re not calling it Call of Duty though. Not that I blame them, I’d be pissed off too if I had Treyarch cashing in on my franchise and reducing the value of its name. I wouldn’t be surprised if Activision had Treyarch work on Modern Warfare 3 next, though I’d definitely acquit any member of Infinity Ward that commits murder as a result. No sane jury would convict.
May 27th, 2009 at 9:37 am
We should all be using the ISO 8601 date standard! Or Star Trek’s star dates of course. Yeah, definitely those.
I’ve only played COD4 briefly. I seem to have run out of steam with the whole ‘realistic military action sim’ genre, it just doesn’t do it for me. The execution was superb, but the setting just doesn’t interest me anymore. I think I have war fatigue.
May 29th, 2009 at 7:16 pm
I’ve grown increasingly annoyed with my country’s month/day/year notation. I’ve become so accustomed to entering dates in YYYY-MM-DD format, that I now have to apply a mental filter whenever I sign and date a paper form. Sometimes I even have to struggle to remember the nonsense zig-zag ordering of granularity. “Is it year/day/month? No, that can’t be it.”