In 1995, Full Tilt! Pinball introduced players to three distinct pre-rendered 3D pinball tables – Space Cadet 3D, Skulduggery, and Dragon’s Keep. Although this game is not as prominent in our collective memory today, Dave Plummer, a former engineer at Microsoft, recently revealed that the Space Cadet 3D Pinball had an especially cringe-worthy bug that he unintentionally missed during development.
In his YouTube post (as shared by PC Gamer), Plummer discussed the process of transferring Space Cadet 3D Pinball from Windows 95 to Windows NT. To accomplish this, he crafted a completely new game engine based on the original software, designed to manage video and audio playback. However, the engine Plummer created had an issue causing it to render frames as quickly as possible. When Space Cadet was programmed using a MIPS R4000 processor running at 200 MHz, it operated smoothly between 60-90 frames per second (fps). However, when played on more advanced hardware, the game’s speed increased dramatically to approximately 5,000 fps.
A few years down the line, someone observed that a single core of multi-core systems was consistently being utilized for playing Pinball. Even though it continued to draw as quickly as possible, it was now rendering at an astonishing 5,000 frames per second due to the significant increase in system speed compared to previous times.
According to Plummer, it was another ex-Microsoft engineer, Raymond Chen, who rectified the issue by implementing a frame rate cap set at 100 frames per second (fps). Now, Plummer finds amusement in his initial error, but he remembers that Microsoft treated bugs of this nature quite severely.
Plummer reminisced about instances where a bug slipped into the product and needed addressing in a service pack. He emphasized that such occurrences were never taken lightly or as a source of amusement, but rather viewed as unfortunate and embarrassing situations.
A version of Space Cadet 3D Pinball is available on the App store.
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2025-09-11 11:49