Integer Overflow – Zaccaria Pinball

Zaccaria Pinball is a pinball game you can buy on Steam. User Breeze posted this screenshot of his score: –1,947,658,906. A negative score!

 What happened is that he has reached the maximum score, then it suddenly becomes negative.

I don’t know what language Zaccaria Pinball is programmed in, but in C#, the maximum value of an “int” type is 2,147,483,647. So I imagine he has surpassed the current record, then suddenly it flipped to the record low score. He must be furious.

It is important you choose the correct datatype to store data correctly. Often on pinball games, people amass some crazy scores that you don’t think are possible, so it would probably make sense to go for the “long” type which has a max of 9,223,372,036,854,775,807. Hopefully the developers change this before annoying more players.