The 5 Most Devastating Crashes In Gaming History

Sometimes mistakes happen and things don't always work out as planned. But when it comes to technological wonders that cost millions of dollars to produce, you expect at least a little bit of testing to be done to make sure the product works as intended. But as we all know, that doesn't always happen. In fact, things can fail so badly the company responsible can lose out on millions of dollars fixing it.

You would think with so much on the line companies would try harder to keep their products from having such insanely devastating flaws, but it happens way more than you think. In fact, here are five such instances that had to have left a sour taste in each company's mouths.

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The Gurren Lagann Game That Killed Computers

The Gurren Lagann anime was quite the phenomenon. Pretty much anyone who watches anime has at least heard of the series, so it seemed like the next obvious step when a video game was announced by Konami, exclusively for PC. The game, titled Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann Chōzetsu Hakkutsu ONLINE was meant to be an MMO where you played as one of the people living underground.

This is the drill that will ruin your computer!

You would be able to dig for treasure and buy upgrades for your equipment. While this didn't sound like that great of a game, people were clamoring to get into the game's closed beta. Unfortunately for those that did get in, they were treated to more than just a game. The beta itself destroyed computers.

Just installing the game would corrupt your hard drive and you would lose all of the files on your computer. This would happen to anyone who installed the game. It was such a wide-spread issue that Konami immediately canceled the game and sent out new 500GB hard drives to all those affected so they could get their computers working again.

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The Great Playstation Hack

Gee whiz, I wonder what this portion could be about. Last year, the Playstation Network service was hacked and a majority of the service's users had their login information stolen. The service went down for a few months while Sony tried to figure out what happened and how they were going to fix it so it didn't happen again.

Some say they stayed at a 90 degree angle for the rest of their lives

Obviously nobody can have a perfect security system, but as more and more information was released it became more apparent that the types of security Sony used was much less than top notch. While the hack probably would have happened one way or the other, the headache brought on by stolen account information could have easily been avoided.

Thanks to the whole outage, it is now customary for people to jump the gun and panic about the PSN being hacked again whenever the service goes down without warning. Its silly to think something as severe as the PSN hack could happen again so soon, but it just goes to show you how bad the break-in hurt Sony's consumer trust.

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Wii Updates To 4.2 And Starts Killing Consoles

The Nintendo Wii has had an insanely difficult battle against piracy over the years. As people became more comfortable with the system's inner workings, it became even easier to mod the console. Obviously Nintendo didn't want that happening because a console that is easy to jailbreak is easy to play pirated games on.

To combat the people modding new features into their consoles, they began releasing firmware updates like they were going out of business. The problem was that the people modding the consoles would have a new update to get past the firmware within days of it's release, making it a war Nintendo could never win.

First result you get when you type Wii update 4.2 into Google

When you start losing a war, you tend to make more mistakes. Nintendo released a new firmware update in an attempt to strip consoles of their modded-in homebrew channels. That firmware was 4.2, and it failed hilariously. Instead of removing the modded-in channels, it managed to brick legitimate owner's consoles.

The only way to get around this brick was to send your console into a Nintendo repair system, have them look through your system to make sure it wasn't modded, and then they would fix it for you free of charge if they decided there wasn't anything modded on it. Nintendo pulled the update rather quickly, but there was still a large number of people affected by the broken update.

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Microsoft Learns The Early Bird Doesn't Always Get The Worm

The billion dollar mistake. Microsoft released the Xbox 360 all the way back in 2005, nearly a year before the release of the Playstation 3 and Nintendo Wii. While this gave them an edge in the sales department, it also meant they had a year less than their competition to make sure their system was tough enough for home use.

The Xbox 360's legacy will be one of death and rage

This proved to be one of Microsoft's biggest mistakes as one after another, launch systems started dying. I myself went through three of them before I finally just gave up and started fixing my own whenever it died. Of course, not everyone is capable of fixing their own system so Microsoft had to deal with a lot of repairs.

While there's no official amount saying exactly how much Microsoft had to shell out to fix all of their broken consoles today, the price was announced to be over a billion dollars back in 2007. Since the new Xbox revision, the number of dead systems has dropped tremendously, but losing out on a billion dollars just because you wanted a head start in the market had to hurt.

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The Playstation 3DTV Is Cheap For A Reason

3DTVs are still a relatively new technology, so the odds of getting one at a budget price is pretty much zero. Unless of course you're willing to go out and buy the Playstation 3D Monitor. It's 24 inches of cheap 3D goodness with a side of awesome split screen innovation. Keyword being cheap.

Despite the flaws... I'm still tempted to get one at $200

You see, these monitors have a habit of just not working. The main problem for most people is the image shown on the screen. For some people the screen will go black for a few seconds every few minutes. But it can get so much worse. Some TVs will just go permanently black with no way to fix it or just plain lose their sound.

The process for getting it repaired is pretty streamlined, but losing access to your gaming TV for a solid week every few months can be pretty annoying despite paying the bargain bin price of $199. It is entirely possible that the TV you get will work perfectly and you'll never have to send it in, but is the $200 investment really worth it for a TV that could have so many problems?

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Obviously these problems eventually got fixed (except for the 3DTV at the moment) but it just goes to show you that the big three aren't perfect. They've all made stupid mistakes, and they've all paid the price for trying to rush a product out as quickly as possible. As always thanks for reading. Are there any other instances of companies screwing up big that you want to mention? Why not do it in the comments below?