In mid-November, members of Sony"s PlayStation Underground received the Holiday Demo Disc and discovered that after executing one of the game demos on the disc, their PS2 memory cards were completely erased. While that doesn"t mean much to nongamers, for anyone who has spent 40-plus hours building a character in a role-playing game or playing through a season of football—well, it"s a huge boot in the trousers.
The sampler disc was sent via mail to members of the PlayStation Underground, an opt-in promotional group that Sony calls a "personal link to all the insider info from the PlayStation world." Ryan Bowling, public relations manager for Sony Computer Entertainment America, said Sony responded to the situation by sending out warning e-mails to PlayStation Underground subscribers telling them to remove their memory cards before playing the demo.