9 Video Games That Were Recalled For Completely Bizarre Reasons
4. Atelier Marie: The Alchemist Of Salburg
Imagine buying a brand-new game, getting home, and ripping off the film wrapper, eager to slot it into your PC or console. Now, imagine that this game you've been looking forward to infected your system with a devastating virus. Yikes.
Bafflingly, this is exactly what happened with the Dreamcast version of Atelier Marie: The Alchemist Of Salburg. The game was first released on the original PlayStation and the Sega Saturn in the late '90s with no major problems to speak of, but its early '00s Dreamcast launch was an entirely different tale.
The Japanese-language version of the game carried a computer virus known as Kriz, which has a catastrophic effect on Windows PCs. It damages the BIOS chip (preventing the system from starting), overwrites files on every available drive, and meddles with core settings and configurations. And, to add insult to injury, it unleashes all this nastiness on Christmas Day. Talk about ho ho ho-ribble timing.
At this point you're probably wondering what a Windows PC virus has to do with a Dreamcast game. Well, The Alchemist of Salburg came on a CD-ROM that could be inserted into a PC, which players could do if they wanted to unlock a bonus screensaver. If they did so, the virus would attempt to infect their hardware.
As a result, the game was recalled from store shelves so the problem could be corrected. On the plus side, at least the Dreamcast console itself was unaffected by all of this, but players who wanted to install a simple screensaver onto their PCs could inadvertently end up causing a ton of damage.