Forum Overview :: Tansin A. Darcos's Alter Ego :: "The best 25c I ever spent." - A billion points in Paperboy

[quote name="Commander Tansin A. Darcos"]Back, oh, around 1978-79 or so, I was traveling a lot through large parts of Southern California (mostly the counties of Los Angeles, Orange and occasionally Riverside), mainly because I liked to learn things and my (college) student bus pass gave me unlimited rides on the bus. So, anyway, I sometimes visited arcades to give me programming ideas, and sometimes I played video games but often watched others if they were playing a game I found interesting or I wanted to but that was the only console for that game. Well, anyway, this kid was playing <i>Paperboy</i>, a video game where you run an obstacle course of avoiding things that would knock you off your bicycle, plus deliver papers to subscriber homes and throw papers through the (closed) windows of houses of non-subscribers to encourage them to subscribe, among other things to do in the game. So I'm watching him since he had the machine. Well, this kid was very good, far better than I was, and I happened to say so. He told me this was nothing, he could score over a billion points. I said that was impossible, I figure a good high score might be 600,000, so he in effect got me to bet him the quarter for the game if he could. I didn't think he could so I agreed. He goes onto the training course, aims for the far right edge at the fence instead of across the finish line, then proceeds to run an inverse video replay of the training course, for which he racks up an insane score, just like he said, over a billion points. Having two years of programming classes by then, I knew what had happened: he'd found a bug he could exploit. Well, anyway, after I finished picking my jaw up off the floor where it had fallen, I gave the kid the quarter. I was a real cheapskate back then, but it was worth it. I'd had more fun watching that kid beat the game than I'd ever had playing it. It was the best 25c I'd ever spent. Over several years I found many bugs on lots of computer systems, some I exploited. I figure that if the laws that we have now had been around then I'd probably have gotten decades in prison for computer crimes. (Nothing nasty or destructive, just things like escalating privileges or using a computer I didn't have authorization for.) Well, anyway, I happened to find video of someone replicating that very glitch: [youtube id=j1YizVyVUd4] This brings back so many memories. [/quote]