Back To The Noughties

We end 2019 with Nick magically travelling in time to January 2003. What will he find?

On 10 January, Ian Carr admitted causing the death of a six-year-old girl by dangerous driving, while driving a stolen car on New Year’s Eve in Ashington, Northumberland. He had only been released from prison two months prior to the fatal crash, and the case drew media attention in the UK due to Carr’s 89 previous convictions – including one for causing death by dangerous driving in 1990 – and two lifetime driving bans. On 31 January, he received a nine-and-ahalf-year sentence for the crime, one of the longest ever handed out for this offence.

On 12 January, Maurice Gibb of the Bee Gees passed away suddenly at the age of 53, in Miami Beach, Florida. Gibb played bass and sang in the group, which became one of the world’s bestselling musical acts thanks to hits such as Stayin’ Alive, Night Fever and How Deep Is Your Love.

Internet traffic worldwide was significantly slowed by the SQL Slammer virus on 25 January.

This barely hit home computers, but infected 75,000 computers – mostly servers, the majority of which were infected in ten minutes. The virus relied on poor IT security, as it used a buffer overflow exploit in Microsoft’s widely used SQL Server database software that had been exposed and patched six months earlier.

JANUARY 2003 – New Metroid games, the return of Shinobi, retro releases and even reviews of Neo Geo games! Stranded in 2003, Nick Thorpe wonders when we’ll get a magazine dedicated to this kind of stuff…