Dreamcast Virus

One of the lesser known facts about Sega's 1998 console Dreamcast is that games for the console typically contained bonus material that could be accessed on a PC.

Games such as Sonic Adventure, Dead Or Alive 2 and ChuChu Rocket! had wallpapers for your computer desktop, MDK2 contained a bunch of viewable concept art, and Shenmue 2 had character biographies to read. One Japanese Dreamcast title in particular, however, contained a very special piece of bonus content on its disc

Atelier (pronounced at-lee-ayy) is a very popular JRPG series about finding materials, mixing potions and fighting monsters. In 2001, a bundle containing both Atelier Marie and Atelier released for the Dreamcast, titled Atelier Marie & Elie: The Alchemist of Salburg

Like many other Dreamcast games at the time, this particular title had additional goodies you could access to popping the disc into a PC, including a number of desktop wallpapers and animated screensaves. What the owners of this game probably weren't expecting, however, was a piece of computer malware that would copy itself to your Windows computer when installing the included screensaver.

1999's Kriz, pronounced chrise would sneakily inbed itself into your computer's memory, infecting as many portable executables as it can. Then, it just sits there and waits until...

The program's payload activates on December 25th, attempting to override every single file on every single drive, including networks and floppies. If this wasn't bad enough, the virus will also try to flash your PC's BIOS, which, if successful, would effectively brick the computer, preventing the user from even being able to do a fresh reinstall of Windows

Thanks to Atelier, the curse of Kriz was unleashed upon the world after its initial debut 2 years prior. So, how did this even happen? It's speculated that the Kriz virus infected the workstation of the developer responsible for the bonus screensaver, which would then make its way onto the game's master copy, before being duplicated en mass to every retail copy of the game disc. The publishers, Kool Kizz, had to issue a statement of warning and apology, offering free antivirus software to any customers who were affected and a clean version of the screensaver installer on their website. Later prints of the game were missing the malware, which is a shame, because that virus is the only reason anyone even remembers this game.

Thankfully this malware is completely benign on modern machines. It was only ever made to infect Windows 9.x, NT or 2000 systems, and modern antivirus software knows how to sniff that shit out and destroy it on sight, so feel free to put as many copies of Atelier Marie & Elie into your modern Windows computers as you can find. In fact, I encourage it. No, no. I demand it. Do it. Find a copy of this game and put it in your computer.