And yes, I've experienced selfish players tanking would-be campaigns twice now, (possibly a 3rd if you could PbP). Oddly enough, each has occurred on one of the few occasions where I actually get to participate as a player instead of running the game.
1st Time: Looong time ago... Big, physical player with the hygiene of a stereotypical convention gamer, and the build and mannerisms of someone who couldn't quite cut it as a jock joins a game that's just getting off the ground for a subset of the folks I normally GM for. His character could be summed-up as power wish fulfillment. Some huge, muscle-bound half-dragon that's all brawn, no strategy.
We don't make it more than a session or two before he decides that he should be the brains of the operation because his character is the toughest, and begins trying to physically cow and dominate the other characters. GM was annoyed, players were annoyed, but of course he's as big as any two of us put together, so everyone is a bit hesitant to call him out.
Finally, the GM decides to just get things out of the way and two of the PCs are put in a gladiatorial arena to duke it out for some reason that escapes me. As the one with the best system mastery in the group, I end up being the other participant with my tiny but defense-oriented gish. Long story short, he goes nova while I delay, evade, and beat him with tactics. He was so discouraged and whiny from then on that we basically decided to cancel the game so we wouldn't have to deal with him anymore.
2nd Time: A few years back, one of my best players decided he wanted to try his hand at GMing for the first time, but he wanted to keep the group small. So it was originally just him, myself, and another friend of ours. Given that he wanted to run a published module, we decided gestalt was more feasible than either a GMPC or each of us playing 2 characters.
For the first couple sessions new GM was doing great, learning a lot, and we were all having friend. Then one of our mutual friends returned from an army deployment and wanted to join in. Now our GI friend had always been something of a braggart and self-professed munchking. First time I ever spoke with him, he was going on about running level 70 epic games in 3.5, and in the games I'd run he always preferred the most physically dominant, ballsy characters he could.
Anyway, he ends up creating what I consider to be one of the most broken gestalt builds I'd ever seen. Some type of barbarian+summoner with a combat-oriented eidolon. On paper, at least, he should have been able to mop the floor with my paladin+bard, of the other player's fighter+inquisitor. Of course, since Pathfinder's a cooperative game, that wasn't something we were worried about... yet.
Well when play starts, we needed a way to get his character involved in the story that had already started, so when working out his backstory we decided my Viking shield-maiden and his barbarian were childhood friends from the same village. Yet when play starts, he wants no part in actually joining in the adventure and just wants to walk off and do his own thing (yes, he knew we were playing a module).
So hours elapse as we try both in-game and out-of-character to get him to cooperate until finally he has his PC attack us, and a mysterious group imprisons us in their temple. Whilst prisoners, he continues being difficult, but at least now we're back on the rails... until the module called for a <drumroll> battle royale in an arena.
As expected, his and my PCs end up being the last ones left standing, and I once again pull off the upset victory which leads to whining and excuse-making on his part. New GM ends up concluding that he doesn't have what it takes to GM, cancels the game and passes the torch back to me again. Took another 3 years before I was able to convince him to GMing another try. :-\
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Thread-appropriate (albeit with a certain twist) story from someone who was in my local Organized Play group for a while (since this thread is full of people who were exiled from gaming groups because everyone hated them, let us note that this person was very popular while he was there, but he died of surgery complications):
Decades ago, this acquaintance joined an already-in-progress game as a latecomer. The DM let him join, but required for some reason that he play a certain character, who happened to be (Chaotic?) Evil. The campaign was a Lord of the Rings-ish grand quest to rid the world of Evil affair, and the player had, somewhere along the way, acquired a deluxe-edition luckblade (the kind with three gems in the pommel that each grant one wish). The party had, as per their grand quest, gathered a set of rings that, when cast into the setting equivalent of the Fires of Mount Doom (TM), would Destroy All Evil In The World (TM), and each party member was bearing one of them. They got to the grand, ring-burning finale, and when it was this player's turn to cast his ring into perdition, he thought, "wait: I'm Evil, right? If destroying this ring will Destroy All Evil In The World, then I'll be destroyed...f!#& that!" Rather than destroy his (now quite officially) One Ring (TM), he uses the one wish he has left in his luckblade to wish himself to the sanctuary of the nearest Evil temple.
Defeat is snatched from the jaws of Victory at the 11th hour, and for some reason, the DM was quite upset (I also don't understand why the rest of the party couldn't have just sought out the nearest Evil temple and raided it to ferret out their Judas and retrieve his ring at that point).