At the end of last year, we saw a lot of lists of best games of the decade. But we didn’t read about the turkeys. The games that really flopped. The games industry’s equivalent of Waterworld. Or Ishtar. Or Heaven’s Gate.

I’m not just talking about games that were bad. There are lots of those. I’m talking about games that took down companies. Some of them were never released. Some of them came out and no-one cared. Some of them even made decent sales — just nowhere near enough to cover the costs.

And all of them were costly for someone. Several of them destroyed companies. Some destroyed careers. Others were, in my view, brave and sensible gambles that didn’t pay off.

As the practice of high-frequency trading continues to become more widespread, concerns are growing that erroneous trades carried out by "algos gone wild"–a sort of digitally amplified version of the "fat finger" phenomenon–could cause a market crash at Internet speed, a meltdown that no one could stop. Two recent market glitches could provide a preview of what's to come.