History Main / PinballScoring

* [[Main/IdleGame Idle games]] tend to take this to the extreme, with typical games like ''VideoGame/CookieClicker'' often having counts eventually ranging from the quintillions to the decillions. Some games come very close to the 1e308 limit of a floating point double; other games like ''Antimatter Dimensions'' have custom code to [[Main/UpToEleven go beyond this limit]], and even the exponent becomes subject to pinball scoring, with numbers like 1e200,000,000 becoming commonplace.

** Similarly, the German version started with 20 marks for one dollar (which gave us the odd "400" note). Not the actual exchange rate as well.

* Traditionally, professional karaoke machines from DAM and JOYSOUND score the player out of 100, with later revisions for each company adding three decimal places for higher precision. In 2017 DAM introduced "Precision Scoring DX Million", which as the name suggests can give players scores in the millions. The system seems to be going for a rhythm game-like feel, complete with combos.

* ''VideoGame/CrimzonClover'' has scores that can go as high as 12 digits long. However, the main highlight of the scoring system is the buttloads of multipliers you get--your Break Rate (which increases as you kill enemies), the lock-on multiplier (shown in green), the Break Rate doubling and quadrupling when you [[SuperMode Break]] and [[UpToEleven Double Break]] respectively, and the showers of stars you get. Each and every multiplier you get is shown when you kill enemies, and often you'll have moments where you cancel a [[BulletHell screenful of bullets]] into a screenful of numbers.

* ''VideoGame/{{Touhou}}'' has a different scoring system for every individual game. In the first six games, potential scores [[SequelEscalation inflated over time,]] from 10-20 million in ''Story of Eastern Wonderland'' to over 100 million in ''Lotus Land Story'' and ''Mystic Square'', to over 600 million in ''Embodiment of Scarlet Devil''. From the seventh game, ''Perfect Cherry Blossom'', all subsequent main games (except the ninth) placed the focus of scoring to ''raising the value'' of Point Items, rather than just collecting them; potential scores are in the billions, depending on the game (''Imperishable Night'' is the highest with a record of over 6.3 billion; ''Mountain of Faith'' is only 2.2 billion).

** The "one point per KO" rule only applies to the North American release of ''The Simpsons'' arcade game. The Japanese version actually assigns point values (divisible by 100) for individual types of enemies.

* Intentionally avoided in Jersey Jack Pinball's ''Pinball/TheWizardOfOz'' for a {{Retraux}} feel; the score levels are noticeably lower than most other modern-day pinball games, including one-point targets. Their second game ''The Hobbit'' scores similarly.

* Inverted in ShootEmUp ''[[Creator/{{ADK}} Sky Adventure]]'', which may be one of the lowest-scoring arcade shmups in existence. {{Mook}}s are only worth a single-digit number of points; a few of the tougher non-boss enemies barely get into the double digits, still only giving up to 15 points though. (Mid-)bosses can give a hundred or two by virtue of their time bonuses. Skilled players tend to get total scores in the upper four-digit range. Interestingly enough, its predecessor ''Sky Soldiers'' has more "conventional" scoring for a ShootEmUp with scores in the millions.

Meanwhile, the extremely quick succession of hundreds of small numbers on a scoring readout or on a screen has both a purely visual appeal and utility. Not only it communicates a feeling of achievement, it also makes the whole process more dynamic and provides important feedback (not unlike flashing lights and other telltales in pinball and action games - the feedback even scales, with more decimals places flashing meaning better result). The ultrafast numbers also connect with a host of stereotypes - from a frantic rush of a million-dollar jackpot to nail-biting sports programmes where one-thousandths of a second decide the winner. Finally, from game design standpoint, more granular points allow for more intricate scoring rules. Soccer has 1s, basketball has 2s and 3s, but in a videogame you can land a hit that satisfies six different conditions and is multiplied by two different modifiers, plus a randomized factor. This means that a score doesn't have to be legible, but after the game it must cumulatively measure the exact merit of a current playstyle - with sports-like precision of fractions of a percent.

* The size of score has waxed and waned over pinball's history. In '30s and '40s, scores were displayed with lights on the backglass and an arbitrary number of zeroes would usually be appended to each "unit" of scoring. When rolling counters were introduced sometime in the '50s, scores simplified down to single points and score counters maxing out at 3-4 digits. Scores did begin to steadily increase again though, back to six digits by the time electronic score counters were introduced in TheSeventies, which only accelerated the presence of this trope, which reached its peak in TheNineties with it being possible to score in the billions on most pins. It arguably reversed in 1996 with Tales of the Arabian Nights; most pins since then usually have scores in the millions or tens of millions.

* In ''VideoGame/KirbysPinballLand'' most ways to score points are 'only' in hundred or thousand increments. The highest individual payoffs are 50,000 from defeating a boss, 77,700 from a top level jackpot, or the maximum of 99,990 in a bonus stage. The score loops back to zero after exceeding 99,999,990 points, which was probably just left in the game as it usually takes several days of play to reach it.

* ''Pinball/TheLordOfTheRings'' has a record potential multiplier - it's possible to get an 84x Jackpot. Activate the "2x Score" Gift from the Elves (2x), activate Gollum Multiball (flips between 1/2x and 2x, for 4x potentially), activate Two Towers Multiball (1x, 2x, or 3x jackpots, depending on how many balls are on the table, for 12x potentially), and combo seven Jackpots (comboing a Jackpot increases its multiplier up to 7x, giving a potential 84x Jackpot.) However, since Gollum Multiball flips between 1/2x and 2x, and the "2x Score" gift lasts for 60 + 30 (if you get add more time) seconds, it's not exactly simple to get...

* Scoring in ''Pinball/Batman66'' can reach absurd levels due in part to the large variety of stackable multipliers, as well as certain "minor villain" power-ups that can keep those multipliers active for the whole ball, or even the whole ''game''. A typical "good" game is around 1 billion, but if you're PAPA 20 champ Escher Lefkoff and really stretch the limits of the game.. scores can reach into the ''trillions''.

** Similarily, the German version started with 20 marks for one dollar (which gave us the odd "400" note). Not the actual exchange rate as well.

* In pinochle, the scoring is often prone to this. Some versions give 10 points for Aces around, while some versions it is worth 100 points. All other values work the same. In a game with 10 for Aces, game is usually played to 500, but in the other version game would be 5000.

[[folder:Live Action TV]]

* In an episode of ''Series/BoyMeetsWorld'', when the High School Quiz Show dumbs itself down to appeal to the LowestCommonDenominator, among the changes include all of its single-digit point values being multiplied by one million. Eventually the show gets rebooted into Huh! That's Cool! with its final question worth one trillion million points.

* Tennis has a bizarre 15-30-40-game point system. Forty used to be 45, but was too hard to say quickly. The points corresponded to degrees on a circle--thus, if you won 4 units of 15 degrees 6 times (enough to win a set), you made it around the circle. This weird symbolism exists because Europeans in the 17th century were obsessed with geometry. Or because a clock was used for scoring, the hands being moved manually. Or because of an older game where winning a point let you move forward, first to 15 feet then 30 and finally 40.
* In Quidditch, the FictionalSport from ''Literature/HarryPotter'', scoring a goal is worth 10 points, and catching the GoldenSnitch is worth 150 points. The point values were probably inflated so that the game would seem rather more fast-paced and interesting than it transpired to be, making it seem even beyond basketball in terms of 'action'. When someone says they won by a hundred points, that sounds like there's a lot going on, while in reality they were probably 5 goals down and then lucked out on the snitch. In fact, the existence of the snitch at all is probably evidence of this trope. It makes NO sense in terms of making a sport that people would actually play, but it gives Harry a way to be awesome and important in the game without actually needing training or having ever seen the game played.

** More specifically, in cricket the score for a single team comprises two numbers: how many runs scored, usually in the hundreds, and how many batsmen were put out, which can be between zero and ten. So a score like 243-6, read as two hundred and forty three for six, is reasonable for one team in cricket. 243-6 in rugby, being the scores of both teams, would be an absolute walkover.

* In [[VideoGame/DanceDanceRevolution DDR 3rd Mix]], endless mode have exponential scoring, with an maximum of 10^72-1. This is 72 little nines spanning the entire width of the screen! You need about a full day of continuous play to get there but it has been done.

* In the {{Website/Neopets}} flash sidegame ''The Return of the Return of Dr. Sloth'', high scores rise exponentially with play skill, though it is one of the lower scoring of games with this distinction. The current high score board has only one entry in the hundred billions.
** This game has not only a score multiplier, but a ''score multiplier multiplier''!
* ''VideoGame/EveryExtend Extra Extreme'' has 20 digit scores. Even the official leaderboards are called the "All-Time Trillionares' Club".

** This is in fact one reason why online scores are often posted using Japanese digit grouping (by powers of 10,000). (The other reason is because the first version only supported Japanese grouping, though a later patch added Western digit grouping by powers of 1000).

* Touhou fangame ''Phantasmagoria Trues''' scoring system has, at it's base, linearly increasing point item values like mainline Touhou games. It also has a multiplier that increases throughout the game. And there's the more typical shmup stage multiplier that ranges from 1x to 999x. Atypically, ''this is squared''. All this, combined with the absurd amount of point items, leads to ''19-digit highscores''.

* ''VideoGame/{{Hellsinker}}'' appears to be very low-scoring at first; a casual player can score maybe 1,000-2,000 Spirits, while competent players can achieve quintiple-digit scores and world-class players can get a little over 130,000. Even most early 80s {{Shoot Em Up}}s don't have world records that low. However, on post-stage {{Score Screen}}s and on the replay screen, scores have four more darkened digits to the right, so either the Spirits counters on the HUD and ranking tables divide scores by 10,000 or those darkened digits are decimal places, making this one of the few games in existence that ''downplay'' you score.

* Played to an extreme in [[http://www.mofunzone.com/online_games/morph.shtml Morph]], an online flash game where you dodge objects, which give you one point when they cross the screen, and get items that make the game harder to play for a little while, but double your score. They do not give you a x2 multiplier. They double your score. After enough points, the game goes into scientific notation.

* ''VideoGame/TotalOverdose'' is notable for an FPS, having a point system that simply represents points scored and aren't a form of currency. Initially exploration is rewarded with these, unlocking upgrades at arbitrary increments. Later these global points become irrelevant, but mission totals remain important for scoring performance and unlocking additional upgrades.
* TI-89 calculator game "Drifter" had a problem with this. It was essentially a game of moving the player object left and right to avoid the ever-shrinking walls of a tunnel. The problem came in with the scoring system for the Classic mode. "Drifting," or not hitting the left or right keys to change your horizontal velocity, would give your entire score multipliers. Drifting one screen would add 25% of your current score to itself, two 50% (of the NEW score after the first screen), and each screen drifted 3 and after (consecutively) would double your score. You can already see where this is going if you drift for ten screens straight or so, but add to that the fact that each "level," for which the tunnel shrinks one pixel or so every 5-15 screens, increases the amount of points added for each tick. Stage 1 gives you one point for each tick, stage 2 gives you two, etc. On a particularly good run, you can get up to stage 15-20. One level is about 100-200 ticks by the way, considering that the first level gives you about that many points if you do very little drifting. tl;dr, the game can crash your calculator due to some massive memory overflow. Certainly nowhere near Giga Wing's and MvC2's scores, but it probably could get that ridiculous with absolutely no inflation if the calculators were actually Windows XP computers. Fortunately, the mode that scored by only drifts, given arbitrary numbers of points instead of multipliers, did not have this problem. There were multipliers in the form of chaining multiple drifts together, but they only affected the points being earned, not total score, and chaining drifts is near-impossible in higher levels.

** Each time you hit a bell, you get the amount of points you got for the last bell plus 10. So when you hit the first bell, you get 10 points, and when you hit a second bell, you get 20 more points, for a total of 30. This trope also appears in other Orisinal games.

** Having said that, though, mundane activities such as going through scenery or killing enemies brings reasonable amounts. What gets the score way up are the end of act bonuses and the wisps. (For instance, Sweet Mountain Act 3 can get you upwards of 600,000 points from Wisps alone.)

* ''VideoGame/AirZonk'' in the original Japanese version has indicators for 兆 (1 trillion) and 億 (100 million) in the score after the fourth and eighth digits. The score is displayed as 0000兆0000億てん. In the American version there are not these indicators, so the scores are effectively lowered by a factor of 100 million.

* The ''VideoGame/{{Disgaea}}'' series does this for both damage and character stats. The damage can go into the ''octillions'' range with the right setup, and stats other then HP (Which has no known limit) cap at 99,999,999 million, at least until ''VideoGame/{{DisgaeaD2}}'', where the developers decided it wasn't good enough and let them go into the hundreds of millions range.

* [[http://maru9.saikyou.biz/huya2/index.html A certain]] ''VideoGame/{{Touhou}}'' Mahjong fangame is notable for its utterly stupid scores - coming both from dealing its players broken starting hands and from its even more broken abilities. Two particularly inflationary abilities stand out: one increases the han value of all hands for the rest of the hanchan by increasingly large amounts every time it is used, while the other ''squares'' the han value for that hand. The highest score on the official ranking is a hand with 160 fu and ''88,529,403 han'', a value that would be 26,650,010 digits if it hadn't overflowed the variable (even under non-aotenjou rules it's a 6,809,954 times yakuman, or 326,877,792,000 points) -- and that's not counting the scores that ''overflowed the ranking's han counter''.

* The various customer loyalty programs that uses a redeemable point system. Usually, 1000 points is equivalent to 1 dollar.

* A certain amount of ValuesDissonance happens in the American perception of football [[note]]"soccer"[[/note]], where a widely accepted perception is that any game that can go on for ninety minutes and ''nobody scores'' is intrinsically boring. A similar widely-held perception in Europe is that a game like basketball, which can result in scores like 140-97, suffers from Pinball Scoring in a big way and the points are just too easy to get, therefore pretty meaningless. (Similar suspicions are laid by football fans against both codes of rugby, especially if it's a high-scoring match; cricket is generally exempted from suspicion as its matches go on for up to five days. And also many people who might be bent to ridicule it for the scorelines don't know enough about it bar its existance.)

* In ''[[VideoGame/StreetPassMiiPlaza Mii Force/StreetPass Squad]]'', scores are done in multiples of 10. You then get 1 point for each squad member you bring to the end of the stage. The game keeps an individual score for each stage (or, in Arcade Mode, where you play through them all in order, these points are not given until you clear the final stage), you're required to carry at least 1 squad member to the end since they supply your firepower, and being a [=StreetPass=] game, you have a maximum of 10 squad members. Thus, the ones digit in your scores, or anyone else's, indicates how many people they held onto by the end of the stage, with a 0 indicating having picked up a full house and not losing anyone. For a shmup though, scores are pretty low, never exceeding six digits per stage.

* Whether it was intentional or not, in the first ''VideoGame/SuperBomberman'', the ''tens'' digit can be an indicator of the number of bombs the player can place plus one. Picking up a Bomb power-up is worth 10 points. Nothing else in the game can change the lowest two digits of the score, as every enemy kill and every power-up that is not a Bomb scores a multiple of 100 points.

* Whether it was intentional or not, in the first ''VideoGame/SuperBomberman'', the ''tens'' digit can be an indicator of the number of bombs the player can place plus one. Picking up a Bomb power-up is worth 10 points. Nothing else in the game can change the lowest two digits of the score.

* The arcade version of [[BreakingOut Breakout]]-clone ''Thunder & Lightning'' gives thousands of points per destroyed block, leading to stages being worth millions of points. The NES version has much more subdued scoring.

* Stern's ''Star Wars'' was also designed to have scores roughly on par with ''Pinball/GameOfThrones'', where 1 billion is considered a solid game. Rather than having persistent playfield multipliers, the player is able to control a set of persistent shot multipliers that can multiply any single shot by up to 40x.
** One of the code revisions had a ''GoodBadBug'' which caused Victory Multiball to last far longer than intended, and left many of the major mode multiball scenes' shots persistently lit. While getting to Victory Multiball is not the easiest thing to accomplish, those who ''were'' able to found themselves putting up 11- and 12-digit scores with relative ease (and it would indeed display all 12 digits). Needless to say, this has been fixed in the most recent revision.

* Whether it was intentional or not, in the first ''VideoGame/SuperBomberman'', the ''tens'' digit can be an indicator of the number of bombs the player can place plus one. Picking up a Bomb power-up is worth 10 points. Nothing else in the game can change the lower two digits of the score.

* Intentional or not, in the first ''VideoGame/SuperBomberman'', the ''tens'' digit can be an indicator of the number of bombs the player can place plus one. Picking up a Bomb power-up is worth 10 points, and everything else in the game scores in multiples of 100.

* The Gummi Ship mode in ''VideoGame/KingdomHearts'' has large scoring. Rank S+9 can require 4,000,000 or more points. Taking enemy fire increases your score, by one. A nice touch is that instead of glowing white when the score goes up the ones digit glows red instead.

* ''Magical Tetris Challenge'' features rather high scoring, especially compared to most variants of Tetris. The bonus at the end of each stage can be in the hundreds of thousands... which gets multiplied depending on the longest {{Combo}} length, with long combos giving multipliers into the thousands. A [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2MVHkFhX8HI TAS]] can score over a billion points in one stage in under two minutes.

* ''Magical Tetris Challenge'' features rather high scoring, especially compared to most variants of Tetris. The bonus at the end of each stage consists of a time bonus, 30,000 points for each Tetris, and 100,000 points per screen clear... which all gets multiplied depending on the longest {{Combo}} length, with long combos giving multipliers into the thousands. Even a casual, first time player can probably get in the hundred thousands in one stage. A [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2MVHkFhX8HI TAS]] can score over a billion points in one stage.

* ''Magical Tetris Challenge'' features rather high scoring, especially compared to most variants of Tetris. The bonus at the end of each stage consists of a time bonus, 30,000 points for each Tetris, and 100,000 points per screen clear... which all gets multiplied depending on the longest {{Combo}} length, with the multipliers getting into the thousands with a long enough combo. Even a casual, first time player can probably get in the hundred thousands in one stage. A TAS can score over a billion points in one stage.

* ''VideoGame/GuitarFreaks'' and ''VideoGame/DrumMania'' had outrageous scoring up until V6; the value of each note is multiplied by your current combo, leading to mostly 8 or 9 digit scores for decently-skilled players. As of the releases of V7 and XG, the maximum score on any song is around 1,000,000.

* Inverted in ShootEmUp ''[[Creator/{{ADK}} Sky Adventure]]'', which may be one of the lowest-scoring arcade shmups in existence. {{Mook}}s are only worth a single-digit number of points; a few of the tougher enemies give double-digit points but no more than 15. (Mid-)bosses can give a hundred or two by virtue of their time bonuses. Skilled players tend to get total scores in the upper four-digit range. Interestingly enough, its predecessor ''Sky Soldiers'' has more "conventional" scoring for a ShootEmUp with scores in the millions.

* Inverted in ShootEmUp ''[[Creator/{{ADK}} Sky Adventure]]''. Most {{Mook}}s are only worth a single-digit number of points, and even the bigger non-boss enemies don't give more than 15. (Mid-)bosses can give a hundred or two by virtue of their time bonuses. skilled players tend to get total scores in the upper four-digit range. Interestingly enough, its predecessor ''Sky Soldiers'' has more "conventional" scoring for a ShootEmUp with scores in the millions.

* Inverted in ShootEmUp ''[[Creator/{{ADK}} Sky Adventure]]'', where getting over 1,000 points on a single stage is an excellent performance, and skilled players tend to get total scores in the upper four-digit range. Interestingly enough, its predecessor ''Sky Soldiers'' has more "conventional" scoring for a ShootEmUp with scores in the millions.

* Inverted in ShootEmUp ''[[Creator/ADK Sky Adventure]]'', where getting over 1,000 points on a single stage is an excellent performance, and skilled players tend to get total scores in the upper four-digit range. Interestingly enough, its predecessor ''Sky Soldiers'' has more "conventional" scoring for a ShootEmUp with scores in the millions.

* ''VideoGame/EveryExtend Extra Extreme'' has 20 digit scores. Even the official leaderboards are called the "All-Time Trillionares' Club"

* In the free ShootEmUp ''[[http://enamel9x.doorblog.jp/archives/1618118.html Illusion Super Dimension]]'', after the score reaches over 18 digits the game will write the extra digits in green underneath (purple in earlier versions). Observe that one of the screenshots on the game's page has 54402689 written in purple. That's a 26-digit score, ''54.4 septillion'' points. The next closest STG, Alternative Sphere, only reaches 21.[[note]]Strictly speaking the best attested human run has only reached 25 digits though.[[/note]]

* There was actually a [[UsefulNotes/TheGreatVideoGameCrashof1983 cancelled 1983]] ComicStrip/{{Garfield}} game that had a rom where someone got a score of 23,418,862,404,272,676,864. Yes, [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garfield_(Atari_game) really.]] Of course, as the official game was cancelled, it's debatable whether or not to even consider this a legitimate example.

* Inverted in ShootEmUp ''Sky Adventure'', where getting over 1,000 points on a single stage is an excellent performance, and skilled players tend to get total scores in the upper four-digit range. Interestingly enough, its predecessor ''Sky Soldiers'' has more "conventional" scoring for a ShootEmUp with scores in the millions.

* Inverted in ShootEmUp ''Sky Adventure'', where getting over 1,000 points on a single stage is an excellent performance, and it may not even be possible to get a total of 10,000 points over the course of the whole game. Interestingly enough, its predecessor ''Sky Soldiers'' has more "conventional" scoring for a ShootEmUp with scores in the millions.

* Inverted in ShootEmUp ''Sky Adventure'', where even skilled players fall short of 10,000 points. Interestingly enough, its predecessor ''Sky Soldiers'' has more "conventional" scoring for a ShootEmUp with scores in the millions.

* One exception is ''NBA Fastbreak'', which has a scoring system surprisingly closer to real-life basketball. High scores are typically in the hundreds. Newer [=ROMs=] have the option to switch to regular pinball scoring, though.

* One exception is ''NBA Fastbreak'', which has a scoring system surprisingly closer to real-life basketball. High scores are typically in the hundreds.
** In the semi-sequel ''NBA'' by Stern Pinball, points are once again in the millions so that you can get millions of points from a 3-point goal.
** Newer ''NBA Fastbreak'' [=ROMs=] have a more standard pinball score in addition to the NBA-style scoring.

** Even this is an illusion - operator menus for many pinball games have settings for how often to give free games for score matches. These can be set by individual percentages. Some pinball games appear to give you multiple numbers to match - Joker's Wild!, for example, appears to give you five different numbers to match, giving the appearance of a ''50 percent'' chance of getting a free game. Funny how players still don't seem to get them every other time...

** In ''Pinball/DialedIn'' the ones digit of any score is always 0, but it still scores similarly to other Jersey Jack games.

** ''Pinball/KissStern'' is a close second, with a potential 60x multiplier (10x + 3x + 2x playfield multipliers which stack additively to 15x, 2x shot multiplier, 2x combo multiplier) in its latest code. In other words, clear 8 songs, lock two balls in the Demon Head in Demon Multiball, collect the Double Scoring award from Backstage Pass, and {{Combo}} into a shot that has a 2x shot multiplier on it. The game was somewhat low scoring even compared to other Sterns of the time before that code update, with only the 2x playfield multiplier and 2x combo multiplier being available previously. Now it tends to exhibit this trope in general, especially on a good game.

* Stern's Star Wars was also designed to have scores roughly on par with ''Pinball/GameOfThrones'', where 1 billion is considered a solid game. Rather than having persistent playfield multipliers, the player is able to control a set of persistent shot multipliers that can multiply any single shot by up to 40x.

* Scoring in ''Pinball/Batman66'' can reach absurd levels due in part to the large variety of stackable multipliers, as well as certain "minor villian" powerups that can keep those multipliers active for the whole ball, or even the whole ''game''. A typical "good" game is around 1 billion, but if you're PAPA 20 champ Escher Lefkoff and really stretch the limits of the game.. scores can reach into the ''trillions''.

* Inverted in ShootEmUp ''Sky Adventure'', where even getting 10,000 points over the whole game seems unobtainable. Interestingly enough, its predecessor ''Sky Soldiers'' has more "conventional" scoring for a ShootEmUp with scores in the millions.