For me it was Fallout 3 on Windows XP. Most crashes I've had in a PC game by far.

When it first came out and on every OS since.

EDIT: I realise now you meant full system crashes. In that case Jetstrike (DOS) has given me the most trouble.

A long time ago I had a lot of system hangs when playing Rayman 2 (retail CD) on Win98. Whenever the game froze the system I have to start the level over after rebooting, which can be very unpleasant on a few very long levels, that I had no choice but to cut the trip short in order to progress to next levels.

I think it was either because of a possibly buggy video driver, or the old CD protection scheme wreaking havoc on Win9x. The system I had back then was a Coppermine Celeron with a Trident Blade XP video card.

I did try playing that game on Win2K on the same system, and I did not experience any crash nor system hang there. So Win2K certainly handled this game better.

Still, in my experience, it is very unusual for WinNT family to hang like Win9x, as something would have to be very, very wrong for that to happen.

LSS10999 wrote on 2026-01-09, 12:53:

Still, in my experience, it is very unusual for WinNT family to hang like Win9x, as something would have to be very, very wrong for that to happen.

This game uses Compatibility settings I never saw other games use. Other than that, it also suffers from unique lag that can be explained as "some kind of choke on a scene load". The 3D causes the BSOD, I don't know what's so special there

Old dos game.

Wizardry 7.
there is a timing sensitive bit on its initial startup that div by 0's if the processor is too fast.

Slowdown apps that work correctly on more recent cpus are rare, and the slowdown only needs to be there for about 2 seconds anyway.

There's *supposedly* a patch to fix this, but I find that it does not work.

All the Mechwarrior 2 engine based games running natively under 32-bit Windows environment could count for this from me, the engine seemingly worked by pure accident and various driver combinations made the problem excessive.

Galaxy 3D Audio in Unreal Engine 1 games also caused me a lot of full on system hangs / BSODs, again, no thanks to Creative drivers at the time.

Creative OpenAL also caused a lot of BSODs for me in Unreal Engine 3 games, especially Unreal Tournament 3.

Actually, the game that gave me the most trouble in terms of hard-locking my system every single time I tried to play it was a more modern games called "Wizorb" from 2012. Fun little breakout style game with RGB elements.

I never managed to get it working on Windows 7. I'm not sure what the deal was, had to be driver related, but for the life of me I never figured it out. When I finally migrated to Windows 10, fired it up, and it worked, was when I finally got to play it many years after I bought it. It managed to lock up clean Win 7 installs, several different video and audio driver versions as well as different hardware. Three different AMD video cards and two different Creative sound cards. Maybe it was an AMD thing, who knows. Though, as soon as I moved to Win 10, on the same hardware that was running on Win 7 at the time, it worked like a charm. I never imagined such a simple game giving me so many problems on a "modern" system.

StriderTR wrote on 2026-01-11, 15:47:

I never managed to get it working on Windows 7. I'm not sure what the deal was, had to be driver related, but for the life of me I never figured it out. When I finally migrated to Windows 10, fired it up, and it worked, was when I finally got to play it many years after I bought it. It managed to lock up clean Win 7 installs, several different video and audio driver versions as well as different hardware. Three different AMD video cards and two different Creative sound cards. Maybe it was an AMD thing, who knows. Though, as soon as I moved to Win 10, on the same hardware that was running on Win 7 at the time, it worked like a charm. I never imagined such a simple game giving me so many problems on a "modern" system.

Reminds me of the time Crysis 2 would BSOD my Windows 7 system. It didn't happen, until I connected the PC to the Internet once. Game wouldn't have issues for any no of times until I got the Internet up. The game would freeze and lag here and there and then a BSOD.

My motherboard failed a month or so later, but I can't tell if it was related, since I was quite confident it would never occur with a clean Windows installation

I would have to say DONKEY KONG on my Coleco EMU..

Im not sure why but often after several mins it screws up and I have to exit the EMU and restart it... (Thankfully it doesnt do it every time!!)

Well I'm not going to count actual stability testing for overclocked CPU or trying to run settings super tight, when I'd crash Doom or Quake a dozen times an afternoon.

Game I remember being most frustrating for crashing for "no reason" on DOS was "The Patrician"... didn't have a retail version I don't think, but some preview edition, so maybe the bugs got fixed. Anyway, never managed to complete a year of trading due to the game crashing out.

interesting topic but i cant think of a single game, if there was one its probably a DOS game, they tend to bring the entire system down and remember that happening fairly regularly

in more recent years there have been games that still crash now and then (fallout 3), or when quitting (also fallout 3) but infrequently enough i can accept it

the sweet (well sour) spot was windows 9x - where some games would crash like a dos game, but some would just error and error and error some more, slowly taking out the OS one bit at a time until you were left with a mouse, no explorer and not much to click 😀

Morrowind on Win2k and XP. That game had an apparent memory leak, especially when reloading a save. I could trigger a crash easily be reloading a few times - or by playing for a couple hours.
But I also had it modded (like many people), so it's hard to say how crashy it would have been if I ran it vanilla.

Honorable mention to X-Wing and NASCAR (Papyrus). Not those games' fault though.
My 486 had a crappy motherboard and wasn't stable - it's stability seemed to track with how much data traffic was flowing to the video display. Some games were more susceptible than others though.
DOOM was stable for whatever reason.
Ultima 7 was unplayable - it would crash almost immediately, so I didn't bother trying.

X-Wing and NASCAR were mostly stable, but I played them so much that I'm sure I logged a ton of crashes in those games.
NASCAR would crash quickly in the full screen external camera, but from the normal in-car camera it would run for hours between crashes.
X-Wing was the same situation - the cockpit view was mostly stable, external camera was not.

Zed. That RTS DOS game with robots. I like it, but it tend to crash when there is too much action. Tried different versions, different computers and different configurations. But it just crashes sometimes.

Most DOS games are pretty stable, espesially ID games. Wolfenstein 3D vesion 1.0 and 1.1 are crash prone. But latest 1.4 never crashes. Played DooM my entire life. Never got to crash it. Only with not original WADs.

Volfied also sometimes crashes with too much acion. And Supaplex have few crashes.

Allmost everything else in commercial DOS world just works, if you get it to work. That is a totally diferent story. CPU speed. Allmost 640kB memory free. Maybe some EMS for bonus.

Need For Speed SE was something I had a lot of problems with back in the day. I could never figure out if it hated other than intel CPUs, or hated CD ROMs faster than 2x, since it might have been scenery load timing dependant on fixed data rate or something. Anyway, totally frustrating to me at the time as it froze frequently.

Not crashed my PC, but I bought EA Superbike 2000 new... and I could *never* get it to run. It just always refused to start. So I own it, but never managed to play it!