The “Break it Down” Blog

Starting last Wednesday, January 28th, every legitimate install of Gears of War for the PC stopped working. When you try to start the game it gives and error that says “You cannot run the game with modified executable code…” and tells you that you should re-install.  However, even after installing it again the game will continue to give that error.

Epic’s Vice President Mark Rein released a statement explaining the issue.

“The online cheat detection features in Gears of War for Windows are based on digital signatures. Well, we made an embarrassing mistake: we signed the executable with a certificate that expired in a way that broke the game.

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.

In the mean time a work-around for this is to set your computer’s date back to a date before today.”

Currently, the only work around is set your computer’s date back to before January 28th, but at least Epic is working on it.  I can understand Epic’s desire to keep people from cheating in their games, but hopefully in the future they can do it in ways that don’t break the entire game.