Former Microsoft Engineer Admits Pinball Mistake

Windows Pinball, a game almost everyone remembers from their childhood, was a seemingly simple game that kept us entertained for hours. But behind the scenes, there was a hidden bug that made the game unexpectedly slow. This mystery was revealed years later with a candid confession from Dave Plummer, the former Microsoft engineer who ported the game to Windows NT. Plummer revealed that the game had, in fact, unknowingly contained a bug that was causing it to run incredibly fast on modern computers.

Pinball’s Secret Engine

When porting Space Cadet 3D Pinball to Windows NT, Plummer preserved the game’s logic but built a new engine around it. This engine was designed for visual and audio processing. However, one small detail escaped him: the engine was attempting to draw frames at an unlimited speed.

At the time, because the tests were conducted on MIPS processors running at 200 MHz, the game was running at around 60–90 fps. This was perfectly normal. However, years later, on much more powerful processors, the game would reach insane speeds of up to 5,000 frames per second, consuming all the processor cores. Pinball suddenly began to eat resources like a ravenous wolf, even on massive systems.

The bug was discovered by another Microsoft engineer, Raymond Chen. Chen added a frame rate limit to the game, limiting it to 100 fps. This not only improved the game’s stability but also prevented the developers from completely crashing while playing Pinball on their own computers. Chen describes this as “the proudest moment of my Windows development career.”

Plummer now smiles about this bug, calling it “the worst Windows bug I’ve ever released in my career.” Back then, such bugs were treated with the utmost seriousness at Microsoft, and any bug requiring a service pack fix was a source of embarrassment. Today, this bug has become an amusing anecdote in the cult story of Windows Pinball.

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