Negative Money

"Negative Money" is the term i use when you do so well in a game (or anything else), your stats go full circle from infinitely good to infinitely bad. i'm sure many games have this kind of a glitch, but for me, the origin of the term comes from a little PC game called Baseball Mogul.

in Baseball Mogul you manage a baseball team's finances/players/draft/etc for as many years as you want. after playing the game for a while, i built a huge fortune, around $2.1 billion dollars by year 70-ish. the off-season came, i sold off a couple players for profit, and noticed that my money went from $2.1 billion to -$2.1 billion. i had SOOOOO much money that it crossed some crazy space/time-continuum and became "Negative Money". *if you want to know the programatic reason of this glitch, read the bottom.

when it comes to sports games, the fun for me is not beating the computer on All-Star mode. my fun comes from keeping it on Rookie and trying to rack up crazy stats. yeah, it's kinda lame as i probably can't beat anyone...but having kobe average 100 points a game for a full season is just too cool. anyways, i'm playing madden '07 for the 360 and i wanted Michael Vick to be the first person to rush for over 1000 yards in 1 game. with 35 seconds left, i had 997 yards and had to gain at least 3 more yards to accomplish my goal. i ended breaking a 50-yard run for a TD with 2 seconds left in the game. i went through the kick-off and the game ended. afterwards i excitedly went to the "stats" menu and found this (click for larger picture):

what the fuck, -955 yards? man, i got Negative Monied BIG TIME! on top of that, as i tried to save the game i got a "disc read error" and the 360 crashed (which now that i think of it, is actually good since it didn't jack up Vick's season stats). you really CAN be so good, that you become so bad.


*being the programmers that we are, toma and i knew this Baseball Mogul glitch had to do with a variable in the program being declared as Integer instead of Long Integer. toma eventually tracked down the exact answer and found that largest representable plain integer is 2,147,483,647 when using 32-bit arithmetic. when the money got that high, the program didn't know how to handle it.