Dave Plummer

So they came into my office and said, hey, what are you doing?

And I said, I told them what I was doing.

They said, well, how do you want to spend your next three months?

I said, I have no idea.

And they said, do you want to port Pinball?

And I'd seen Space Cadet Pinball as a game standalone for the Win95 platform.

And it had a couple of different tables and it was a cool game.

So I was kind of excited.

What they wanted was some visual splash for NT to show that NT can do for then high-speed graphics and, or at least responsive graphics.

And so I took a shot and unfortunately, a lot of the code was in assembly and I was on the MIPS.

So I had to rewrite the code in C so I could then port it to all the different platforms.

And at the heart of the game is a huge state engine.

And it's like a giant switch statement with, if I remember, like 50 entries in it.

And it's got an Easter egg built in and decoding the state.

It's like running a neural network through this thing as you hit it with different states.

And I just put it aside and treated it as a black box.

And so my code runs on top of that and does the drawing and the sound and everything else.

But the original game is still running.

And somebody recently asked me, why is it slightly different?

The physics are slightly different from the Windows 95 version, but it should be the same code because I'm trying very hard to preserve that.