It’s an homage to the days of floppy diskettes. Usually, when there was an unrecoverable disk read fail the system would make a characteristic grind-buzz-kachunk noise as the drive tried a hi-low track seek before stopping. Then it threw the dreaded error, “Problem reading disk. Abort (A)? Retry ®? Fail (F)?”
Not a new curse, but very rare.
It’s an homage to the days of floppy diskettes. Usually, when there was an unrecoverable disk read fail the system would make a characteristic grind-buzz-kachunk noise as the drive tried a hi-low track seek before stopping. Then it threw the dreaded error, “Problem reading disk. Abort (A)? Retry ®? Fail (F)?”
It meant your game was cooked.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abort,_Retry,_Fail%3F
In fact, it looks like it’s almost a decade old.