What is the Berry glitch?

Early copies of Ruby and Sapphire carry a flaw in their real-time clock: 366 days after the game is first started, time-based events quietly stall. Berries stop growing, the Shoal Cave tide stops turning, daily events stop renewing. The cartridge's save is safe; its calendar is broken. It is easily confused with the era's other clock failure, a dry internal battery, which announces itself at boot with the message that the internal battery has run dry and clock-based events will no longer occur. The glitch, pointedly, shows no such message.

Nintendo treated it as a defect to be repaired, and the repair is a collector's story. The Berry Program Update travelled on the bonus and preview discs for Pokémon Colosseum, through Pokémon Channel and Pokémon Box, on e-Reader cards in Japan, and inside FireRed, LeafGreen and Emerald, so one game could patch another through the link cable. Later production runs of Ruby and Sapphire shipped with the flaw already fixed.

The distribution hardware tells the era's story: a bug in a cartridge, fixed by another console, through a cable, at a shop or an event. No download, no update prompt, just a repaired berry clock to prove the trip.

Owners of early Ruby and Sapphire copies can check their cartridge's behaviour against this history; the glitch is a documented chapter of the games' first year, not wear and tear.