Answer: A South Park Episode

In 1999, Electronic Arts issued a massive recall of the PlayStation version of their recently released game title Tiger Woods PGA Tour to the tune of 100,000 copies. While traditional reasons for recalling a game usually revolve around manufacturing defects, this recall was a bit different.

Someone working on the project at EA Sports had slipped a hidden copy of the uncensored South Park “pilot” episode onto the game disc for the PlayStation release of the title. The episode wasn’t viewable during game play or in a PlayStation itself, but if you popped the PlayStation disc into your PC and opened a file named Zzdummy.dat, then you would be able to view the episode in a video player.

While including copyrighted material on the game disc, in and of itself, was rather problematic enough had it only been a copy of a pop song or some silly photos, EA would likely have just paid the copyright holder and been done with it (rather than incur the expense of recalling 100,000 units). As it stood, however, the included South Park episode, The Spirit of Christmas (a.k.a Jesus vs. Santa), was considered far too offensive to leave out in circulation and was recalled based on objectionable content.