On the morning of December 28, 1998, the day before the game Myth II: Soulblighter was supposed to hit the store shelves, the publisher received a phone call:

[…] one of Bungie’s overseas publishers called to say that a woman had played the game and then tried to uninstall it. The game software had uninstalled Myth II as it was supposed to--but it had also erased some of the other files on her hard drive.

The first reaction was panic […] [Bungie cofounder Jason] Jones and another programmer tried to replicate the problem. They quickly found it and figured out how to correct the faulty lines of code. Fixing the problem would be easy—except for the 200,000 copies that were already packaged or on the road.

Seropian, Jones, Zartman, Donohue, and sales and marketing director David Joost met to decide what to do. They had two options. The first was to say nothing. The argument in favor of this alternative was that the problem occurred only when the program was uninstalled and then only when someone had installed the game in an unconventional way to begin with. Since the chances were slim that anyone would install the game in this weird fashion and uninstall it right away, the risk to the company’s reputation was minuscule, particularly since they could post an announcement on their Web site along with a free patch that could be downloaded to correct the problem.

The second option was to recall the game. That would force them to trace every copy that had already gone out, scrap every finished copy, and start all over again.

The story continues in a Chicago Reader article by Bill Mahin preserved on Internet Archive – there’s a blizzard and other things going wrong – and is a great callback to the days of software being sold as physical media, in physical boxes.

I was curious about the cause of the bug, and found this answer from someone who worked on the original Myth I:

So I wrote the Myth TFL installer (not this one). The reason this happened is because you could install other maps and whatnot, and to make the uninstall clean, we had to recursively delete your data folder.

In the sequel, somehow that code […] was used to delete the applications directory, instead of just the data directory in the applications directory. So if you installed it on C:\, it would delete everything recursively from there.

Nowadays, uninstall usually leaves any user installed files (like saves or downloaded content) but at the time, as the article suggests, hard drive space was more precious. Also, I wasn’t there for this issue, so I don’t know the above for sure, but having written the previous installer, I’m pretty confident that’s what happened.