Cygames brought its card-battle RPG Shingeki no Bahamut back online at 20:00 JST on 29 October 2026, ending emergency maintenance that had run since 22:00 on 21 October. The game’s official X account announced the reopening, and AUTOMATON reports that the PHP version upgrade and wide-ranging program fixes were completed, with 5,000 in-game gems handed out to players as an apology.
The shutdown began on the night PHP published fixes for two critical remote code execution flaws, which sent Cygames, SEGA, Square Enix and other Japanese companies into emergency maintenance, as GameTales reported. Most services returned within two days. Shingeki no Bahamut did not. On 22 October Cygames said the work would take more than a week, because the game had to move from an old PHP version to a new one several generations later, which required extensive changes to its code and checks across the whole game, according to Game*Spark.
Two other long-running Japanese games faced the same patch and closed instead. The travel game World Quest and the idle RPG Boku no Makai wo Sukutte!, both more than ten years old, said they could not take sufficient measures on their old systems, ASCII.jp reported in a piece that set their closures against Cygames’ decision to rebuild.
Shingeki no Bahamut launched in September 2011 as Cygames’ first title and was adapted into the 2014 TV anime Shingeki no Bahamut: Genesis. Since its operation was reorganised in 2022 it no longer receives new story scenarios or cards, but its servers keep running with events and campaigns, AUTOMATON notes, and it is playable in browsers and on Android. That makes the eight days of server work a choice to keep a maintenance-mode game alive rather than an investment in new content. Other operators of legacy PHP games have a second date to plan for: according to the PHP 8.2.35 release notes, PHP 8.2 reaches end of life on 31 December 2026.