Myth II: Soulblighter · PC · 1998 · Impact: Industry-Changing
Bungie found a bug in Myth II's uninstaller that could erase an entire hard drive — after 200,000 copies had shipped to retailers. The recall cost roughly $800,000, and in the end exactly one person ever fell victim to it.
The flaw was in the uninstaller's logic about what it was allowed to delete. It removed the directory the game had been installed into, without adequately guarding against the case where that directory was the drive's root — so a player who installed Myth II to the root of their hard drive and later uninstalled it would find the uninstaller working outward through everything on the disk. The discovery was almost accidental and came from the far edge of the company. A Bungie employee in the Japanese office, working on the Asian versions, attempted to uninstall a final build she had placed in the main root folder of her drive and watched it consume the machine. By that point copies were already moving to retailers. Bungie recalled roughly 200,000 units before they reached customers, produced corrected discs, and absorbed a cost estimated at around $800,000 — a substantial sum for a studio of that size in 1998, and one spent entirely on a disaster that had not yet happened to any customer. The final tally is the part that lodges in the memory: despite the recall, exactly one person is known to have been hit by the bug.
Bungie's position in 1998 was genuinely awful. The discs were made, the boxes were moving, and the bug required a specific and uncommon user choice — installing to the root of a drive rather than a subfolder — to trigger at all. A studio inclined toward optimism could construct a comfortable argument for shipping: most people install to Program Files, a patch can go out, the exposure is small. That argument would even have been mostly right, as the eventual single-victim count demonstrates.
They recalled it anyway, at a cost of roughly $800,000. The reasoning holds up better than the arithmetic does. A bug that destroys a customer's entire hard drive is not a defect in a product; it is a catastrophe visited on someone who trusted you, and the cost to them is unbounded — work, photographs, everything on the disk. Weighing that against a probability estimate is the wrong frame. Bungie paid a large sum to avoid a small chance of doing something unforgivable, which is a defensible way to think about risk and a rare one.
Exactly one person ever fell prey to the uninstaller bug. That fact does something strange to the story: measured purely by outcomes, Bungie spent $800,000 to prevent one incident, and the recall looks like a catastrophic overreaction. Measured by what was known at the time, it was straightforwardly correct — nobody could have known the number would be one, and the plausible range extended to thousands.
This is the uncomfortable shape of most good risk decisions. They are judged afterwards against an outcome that only one branch of the possibility tree produced, and the branch that materialised makes the precaution look either prophetic or foolish depending on luck. The Myth II recall is remembered as an industry parable precisely because both readings are available. It is simultaneously a story about a studio doing the honourable expensive thing, and a story about a studio spending nearly a million dollars to protect a single unlucky person from an uninstaller. Both are true.