9 Video Games That Were Recalled For Completely Bizarre Reasons

by Danny Meegan

1. Tiger Woods 99

What do Jesus and Santa Claus have in common? They both got a Tiger Woods golf game pulled from store shelves.

Released in 1998 for the PS1 and Windows PCs, Tiger Woods 99 was as safe and by-the-numbers as you'd expect from an annualised EA Sports series, but it did have one rather extreme feature that gave the family-friendly game a more mature edge.

Not too long after it launched, players discovered that the PS1 version of the game contained an unusual easter egg, in the form of an episode of South Park buried within the game disc. This episode - commonly known as Jesus v. Santa - was uncensored, and most definitely did not belong in a game that was rated as suitable for kids.

While the episode wasn't viewable by using the PS1 itself, if players inserted the disc into a PC and delved into its files, they could find it without too much trouble. Evidently, one of the developers had sneaked the episode onto the disc without telling anyone, which is honestly a pretty strange thing to do. Maybe they hated Tiger Woods?

Either way, EA released a statement calling this inclusion "objectionable to consumers", and recalled roughly 100,000 affected PS1 copies.

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Contributor
Contributor

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!