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.

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Danny has been with WhatCulture for over ten years, and is currently Doctor Who Editor and WhoCulture Channel Manager, overseeing all of WhatCulture's Whoniverse coverage. In 2022, he took charge of WhoCulture and has grown it into the biggest Doctor Who channel on YouTube, and one of the biggest Doctor Who communities on the web full-stop. He has been writing and video editing since his early teens, and first got a taste for content creation after making his own Doctor Who trailers, off the back of a burning obsession with the Matt Smith era of the show. Like many his age, he first got into Doctor Who with the 2005 revival, but has since gone back and fallen in love with the classic years too. If you need someone to recite every Doctor Who episode in order, or to give you a random factoid about the making of Gridlock, Danny is the person to ask!