Turns out, the buttery-smooth experience of playing 3D Pinball on Windows NT wasn’t just nostalgia; it was a hilarious coding oversight. Former Microsoft engineer Dave Plummer, the man behind everything from Task Manager to native ZIP support, admitted he accidentally turned the classic game into a silent resource monster.
3D Pinball ran wild thanks to one missing limiter
When Plummer ported the game over from Windows 95, he didn’t just drag and drop the files. He rebuilt the rendering engine entirely to work with NT’s graphics and audio systems. But he missed one crucial thing: a frame limiter.
“My game engine had a bug, in that it would draw frames as fast as it could,” Plummer said on his YouTube channel, Dave’s Attic. That might not sound like a big deal until you realize what machines it was running on.
Coded on a 200 MHz MIPS R4000 CPU, the game still clocked in around 60–90 FPS during testing. Plummer figured that was more than fine. But on faster machines, like those that came later, that bug meant the game would ramp up to ludicrous frame rates up to 5,000 FPS.
Star Wars Outlaws update on Switch 2 adds performance fixes, visual upgrades, UI improvements, and smoother story pack content.
Why this weird bug made 3D Pinball so memorable
If you’re wondering how a ’90s pinball game could even benefit from high frame rates, well… it didn’t. But it felt smooth. Ball movement, flipper response, and animations all looked snappy, especially on early NT boxes where games often chugged.
Here’s why the bug actually helped:
- It made the game feel extremely responsive
- It used spare CPU cycles during idle time
- It worked fine on slower hardware
- It became unintentionally future-proof
Pinball was a small game with unexpected depth
3D Pinball was never meant to be a showcase. But because of Plummer’s overbuilt rendering engine, it ended up more performant than almost anything else shipping with Windows at the time. It’s a weird case where a development oversight became part of the charm.
So if your childhood memories include slamming that Space Cadet table at warp speed, now you know why: it was running at a frame rate most AAA games still can’t hit today.
