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Comment by KSteffensen | Hacker News Reader

Please fix the integer overflow. Total income over the game was tracked in a 32-bit signed int, so if you earned too much money suddenly the total would turn negative and your stocks would crash.

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I never found the bug in that direction. I discovered it the opposite way: when starting out, selling shares (or was it taking loans?) all the shares you can. Get around 30+ million in the hole and continue to lose money. Eventually an arithmetic overflow will occur and then suddenly you'll have a net worth of like $30-40 million and have the money form selling stock to build to your heart's content.

hahah this was it! make so many debt ur suddenly rich haha. kinda like evil corpos do today no? hahahha

"Too big to fail"... ironically a very realistic feature.

"If you owe the bank $100, you have a problem. If you owe the bank 2^32 dollars, the bank has a problem."

Sounds like the famous Gandhi bug in Civilisation:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_Gandhi

edit: turns out this was a fabrication, good thing I read my cited source!

"On September 8, 2020, Sid Meier's autobiography, Sid Meier's Memoir!: A Life in Computer Games, was released, containing confirmation that the Gandhi software bug was fabricated and a detailed background of the urban legend's formation"

from the above link

As described by the posts, the original used 16-bit signed integers. The fix was to switch to 32-bit.

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