[gambiting]

I'm aware of one game that the company I worked for made that nearly released and that would have broken every GameCube that played it, Nintendo had to pull 50k discs from distribution just before they were sent to retailers and destroy them.

The issue was that one programmer used an unauthorized system call to make the disc drive spin twice as fast, as they thought it was a great way to resolve some of the data streaming issues the game had. And yeah it worked - but after few hours of playing it would kill the GameCube. It wasn't really noticed because no one tests the game on actual discs right until actual gold master is made(usually), and then when the devkits died it was considered a random hardware fault and Nintendo just replaced them.

[AStonesThrow]

Ah, the HCF system call?

[gambiting]

Honestly it was just before my time at that studio so I don't know exactly how that was done, but everyone knew about it because it cost us a lot of money and damaged our relationship with Nintendo somewhat. The game actually went on to be pretty successful after that, but yeah, would have been a disaster.