I’m not quite sure why I played so much Pinball on my Windows machine during my childhood, nor why it had so many names like Space Cadet 3D Pinball, 3D Pinball for Windows, or Microsoft 3D Pinball. One thing is certain: it ran impeccably on my old Windows NT 4.0 system.

Dave Plummer, a former Microsoft engineer, explained this anomaly during a recent episode of his YouTube channel, Dave’s Attic. He shared that when he ported the game to Windows NT, he inadvertently developed a resource-intensive game engine to manage video rendering and sound.

“My game engine had a bug, in that it would draw frames as fast as it could,” he recounted. Translation: “Mon moteur de jeu avait un bug, en ce sens qu’il dessinait des images aussi vite qu’il le pouvait.”

Initially, the pinball game operated at a speedy 60-90 frames per second on a MIPS R4000 processor at 200 MHz—an adequate speed for such a game genre.

However, Plummer noted that when multi-core machines emerged, the game was utilizing a full core constantly, leading it to run at a staggering 5,000 frames per second! Plummer humorously reflected on this oversight, noting it was both funny and a minor embarrassment at Microsoft at the time.

Continued Nostalgia: Plummer’s ex-colleague, Raymond Chen, recalled optimizing the frame rate down to a manageable 100 fps, making it more playable without burning through system resources. It’s amusing how such a seemingly small issue led to hilarious outcomes, especially within the ever-evolving landscape of technology.