Demo Disc Virus

Ahhh Christmas. It's a wonderful time of year. Getting to spend time with friends and family, giving gifts to your loved ones, and what's likely most peoples' favorite part: receiving gifts. What's your favorite Christmas gift? Personally, mine is a custom painted 3D printed figurine of Aigis from Persona 3, I knew that she was likely making a figure of some sort for me, but I was genuinely floored when I laid my eyes on this fantastic figure. Thank you, Mel, I love you!

What if, however, instead of getting a thoughtful gift from a loved one for Christmas, you got a fucking virus for your Playstation 2?

That's exactly what subscribers of Sony's Playstation Underground magazine recieved in 2004, as that quarter's magazine came with another of many demo discs (which were basically just game discs containing portions of full retail games, usually with other goodies as well).

The ESRB T rated version of the 2004 Holiday Demo Disc hosted a deluge of free demos for many of the hottest games coming out at the time, including Ratchet & Clank: Up Your Arsenal, Jak3, Star Wars: Battlefront, Spyro: A Hero's Tail and most infamously Viewtiful Joe 2.

The Viewtiful Joe 2 demo graciously allowed for 20 minutes of play starting at the beginning of the game, almost enough time to beat the entire first level if you're as skilled as me (I'm horrible at the game). Once the invisible 20 minute timer is up, instead of displaying a screen advertising features of the game and booting you back to the demo disc main menu, the whole console seemingly crashes to a black screen, forcing you to restart the system. You may not notice the devastating effects of the crash yet, but you surely will the next time you try to play a full game. Your save file, the data containing your many, many hours of gameplay, is gone. It's a shame, but it happens, blocks of data on the Playstation 2 corrupting wasn't an unheard off occurance. What is a lesser heard of occurance is your game completely failing to even create a new save file. Turns out, it wasn't just this one block of data getting corrupting. It was the whole of every memory card plugged into the system

When Viewtiful Joe 2 crashes at the end of the demo, it for whatever reason corrupts both the slot 1 and slot 2 memory cards, requiring you to format them and completely wiping them clear of all save data.

Once this issue was brought to Sony's attention, Playstation Underground had to act quickly, warning all of their subscribers not to play one of the demos on the disc that they sent out for Christmas.

No forms of compensation were given to affected players, and to this day it's still not known exactly how or why a game demo of all things has memory-card corrupting glitch.