Pool of Radiance: Ruins of Myth Drannor · PC · 2001 · Impact: Data Loss
Where Bungie caught its hard-drive-destroying uninstaller before release, this one shipped. Uninstalling the original 1.0 release deleted system files and left the operating system unable to boot.
The uninstaller in the 1.0 release of Pool of Radiance: Ruins of Myth Drannor removed system files along with the game, taking out enough of Windows that the machine would no longer start. A player who bought the game, decided against keeping it, and uninstalled it in the ordinary way was left with a computer that needed the operating system reinstalled. The timing made it far worse than the same bug would be today. This was 2001, comfortably before games patched themselves on installation, so getting the fix — the 1.1 uninstaller patch — required knowing the bug existed, having a working internet connection, and going to find it, all before uninstalling. The people most likely to be destroyed were exactly those least engaged with the game: someone who played briefly, never read a forum, and removed it. Later retail pressings shipped pre-updated to 1.2 with the corrected uninstaller included, but the original run was already in circulation. The episode produced one of the great changelog entries in software history, in patch 1.4: "removed automatic /System32/ deletion on uninstall due to player feedback."
The cruelty of this bug is in who it selected for. Triggering it required uninstalling the game — an action taken by people who had decided they were finished, which is to say the players with the least investment and the least reason to have gone looking for patches. Someone deeply engaged with the game, reading forums and applying updates, was comparatively safe. Someone who tried it, shrugged, and tidied up their hard drive lost their operating system.
The 2001 context is essential. Automatic patching on install did not exist as a norm, broadband was far from universal, and a large share of players had no routine mechanism for learning that a fix existed. The remedy — apply the 1.1 uninstaller patch — presupposed knowledge that the bug was there, which the affected population by definition did not have. A fix that requires the victim to already know is not much of a fix, and the original run stayed in circulation regardless.
The patch 1.4 note — "removed automatic /System32/ deletion on uninstall due to player feedback" — has survived as a joke, and it earns the laugh honestly. The phrase "due to player feedback" belongs to balance changes and quality-of-life requests; attaching it to the destruction of the Windows system directory produces a bureaucratic deadpan no comedy writer would attempt. It reads as though deleting the operating system had been a design decision that testing eventually found unpopular.
Underneath the joke is the real comparison. Bungie found essentially this bug in 1998 before release and spent $800,000 recalling 200,000 copies; one person was ultimately affected. Pool of Radiance shipped it, and the fix was a patch that the people at risk were structurally unlikely to find. Same class of defect, opposite decisions, and the difference between them is the difference between treating a customer's hard drive as their property and treating it as an acceptable casualty of a release schedule.