Twenty-five years ago, millions of people were nervously looking ahead to New Year’s Eve.
When the clocks struck midnight, they wondered, would they lose power? Would planes fall from the sky? Would banks collapse and the world order crumble?
Such nightmarish fantasies were never truly based in reality, but the public genuinely feared that the computer systems society had become increasingly reliant on would fail at the stroke of midnight, ushering in a dark beginning to the year 2000.
For years, computer engineers and government officials had worked on what was then called the Year 2000 problem, also known as the Millennium Bug. Starting in the 1950s and ’60s, programmers stripped the first two digits of the year from code in order to save time and money. The assumption was that the code would be replaced long before the turn of the millennium.
But in the following decades, engineers began to sound the alarm that if computer systems switched from 1999 to 1900, it would cause massive disruptions, affecting the electric grid, nuclear power plants, hospitals, supermarkets, government agencies, and home computer users.
In the final months and weeks of 1999, officials expressed optimism that the crisis would be averted, and that the countless hours and billions of dollars invested in the problem had minimized its impact. But that didn’t stop people panicking and stocking up on food, water, and weapons. Celebrities weighed in on whether they were freaking out or not. The Simpsons episode “Life’s a Glitch, Then You Die” parodied the fears.
But New Year’s Eve came and went, and the impact turned out to be relatively minor. As a result, Y2K has become somewhat of a punchline and an exaggerated threat, despite the unsung heroes who worked diligently behind the scenes to prepare.
In 1999, actor and recent Saturday Night Live cast member Kyle Mooney, then 15 years old, felt somewhat let down by the anticlimactic ending to the Y2K panic.
Twenty-five years later, he has directed his debut film, Y2K, which imagines a nightmare scenario far beyond what anyone had predicted. Sean Rameswaram talked to Mooney about his memories of Y2K and what it was like revisiting late ’90s culture with a cast that was mostly born after the event he depicts.
Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get podcasts.
Sean Rameswaram
Tell us about the thing you made.
Kyle Mooney
I made a movie called Y2K, wrote it with my pal Evan [Winter], and it’s somewhat based on our lives. I was 15 when Y2K happened. He was 14. And for those of us who were alive during Y2K, it was a letdown and nothing really happened.