this post brought to you by my friend @NanoDrive who credited @death-the-gal for explaining it to her so i guess you can say they co-wrote it

daily knowledge: Morrowind for the original Xbox had a memory leak that shipped with the game. Instead of fixing it, Bethesda cached the game binary and its current state to hard disk, jumped over there and did a soft reset of the Xbox to purge the system's memory. Every time you see a loading screen in Morrowind, the Xbox is restarting itself in the background with just a static image displaying to hide that fact.

So if you're ever playing Morrowind on Xbox and you leave it idling for a few hours, the game will crash, guaranteed.