[andai]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_Gandhi

From what I heard, there was a Civilization game which suffered from an unsigned integer underflow error where Gandhi, whose aggression was set to 0, would become "less aggressive" due to some event in the game, but due to integer underflow, this would cause his aggression to go to 255, causing him to nuke the entire map.

The article says this was just an urban legend though. Well, real or not, it's a perfect example of the principle!

[luaKmua]

Indeed an urban legend. Sid Meier himself debunked in his memoir, which is a pretty great read.

[mrguyorama]

It's fascinating to live through the entire lifecycle of:

Weird thing happens. People make up reasons why. One reason is possible. That becomes THE reason, and spread wildly, without confirmation, as an accurate explanation. "Actually that's not true". Now that not being the reason is widely disseminated and if we are lucky the original meme dies out!

But it took 30 years. For a very meaningless rumor.