History Main / Cap

* One of the key contributing factors to the notorious difficulty of ''The7thSaga'' was the cap of 9 for any item in your inventory. It made [[HealThyself healing thyself]] rather difficult, mind-boggling so in a game that also gave you an infinite-use health restoration item.

* The caps in ''VideoGame/ChronoTrigger'' are a bit of an oddball compared to other Square-made {{Role Playing Game}}s. The heroes' HP and MP cap at 999 and 99, respectively, one-tenth of the values ''Franchise/FinalFantasy'' heroes have. However the heroes still deal damage comparable to Franchise/FinalFantasy heroes, and their damage cap is 9999 (Ayla's [[InfinityPlusOneSword strongest fists]] hit this cap with every critical). Meanwhile, the enemies that deal 700 damage on a strike are genuinely terrifying.

* ''[[SaGa Final Fantasy Legend]]'' characters had a visible cap of 999 on HP. However, human characters didn't get HP from levels or other internal stats; they got them from buying HP-increasing items. The items themselves were at least partially capped in their effectiveness (use enough and even the most powerful would only add 1hp) - but could increase the value well over 999.
** In the second game, Humans and Mutants have a chance of their stats increasing at the end of battle, with that chance going up if they happened to use that particular stat in that battle (casting spells for Magic or taking damage for HP, for instance). They can't gain attributes past the cap of 999 HP or 99 Strength, Agility, Magic, or Defense, but a naked Human or Mutant could level to the cap and then put on armor or use rare stat-boosting items to break it. Robots don't level up permanently but can also break the displayed stat cap by wearing multiple copies of powerful equipment [[spoiler: or by utilizing a GoodBadBug to give them potentially infinite amounts of agility]].
*** Worth noting is that stats will loop around to 0 if they go over 255. And for whatever strange reason, some calculations involving agility only use the last two digits of it, so a character with 100 agility is slow as molasses.
*** Also worth noting is that ''damage'' caps are completely absent here; you can do five-digit damage long before it was possible in most {{Role Playing Game}}s if you have enough strength, agility, and the game's InfinityPlusOneSword.
** SaGa3 just does away with trying to cap your HP (displayed as 999 if exceeded) and core stats (which still actually cap at 255 but only display as 99 if you have more). You can see someone's actual max HP if you revive them in battle; the amount of HP recovery will be displayed in full. A level 99 human or mutant will have max HP in the 2000s. Robots can just go nuts; they get stronger in the same way humans did in the first game.
*** The DS remake (which completely overhauls the level system with a StatGrinding system like the other SaGa games) uses your base stats as a human as the standard with a cap of 1999 HP and 99 for other stats, and other classes' stats are calculated as percentages of your human stats. For example, Beasts have 120% the HP of humans, so their HP can go up to 2399. They have 90% strength, so their max strength would be 89. These are only the base stat caps; they can be exceeded with equipment bonuses.

** Getting Crap Past the Cap

* In the original PC88 version of ''VideoGame/{{Ys}} I'', and its Windows PC remake, your level cap was Level 24 at 65535 EXP, resulting in the battle with Dark Fact being very long and hard. ''Ys I and II'' for the TurboGrafx16 had a different leveling scale and was capped at 99999, making the Fact battle much easier if you level-ground enough.

* Old DOS game ''The Ancient Art of War'' ([[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ancient_Art_of_War considered to be the original real-time strategy game]]) had a cap to how many units total could be visible on the map at any time, ''total'' - not per side. You could group troops into units. This allowed for a strategy of making many weak units to force the computer to create stronger units - but fewer and thus easier for the player to avoid.

* ''VideoGame/NewSuperMarioBrosWii'' rewards you for reaching the cap of 99 lives. [[spoiler: Mario will take his hat off when the cap is reached]].

* In ''VideoGame/NewSuperMarioBros 2'', Coin Rush mode has a score cap of 30,000 coins. At least [[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ScNldvhodec one player]] had already achieved this within 3 days of the game's release in Japan - before the game had even been released anywhere else.
** The main coin counter caps at 9999999 coins, and surprisingly enough, you get a change in title screen and message if you manage to somehow reach that.

* In ''VideoGame/TalesOfSymphonia'', the EXP readout at the end of battle will only go up to 65535, and any more will cause the counter to roll over back to 0. However, you still gain the 65536+ EXP and level up properly; it just doesn't report correctly on the victory screen.

* ''MapleStory'''s current (Global) version has a damage cap of 999999 per hit. For those whose damage would otherwise consistently hit over this cap, some item potentials allow you to go over the cap by certain amounts, like +5000 or so. Some skills also have their own individual damage caps that tend to go much higher, like up to 9999999 in some cases. And then in an upcoming update, the global damage cap per hit is going to be raised to 50 million, essentially removing the main advantage of any skill that had its own cap.

*** It also didn't help that the lives counter was only displayed between stages or just after losing a life, so anyone using an infinite lives trick had to track the lives gained independently of the game interface anyway.

** A more "game design"-y cap in the VideoGame/SimCity games comes from demand caps: limits that stifle demand as your city grows, with relief from the caps generally provided by parks & rec (for residential) and connections/ports (for commercial and industrial).
* The original ''EscapeVelocity'' game had a cap on the amount of ships in a star system; this meant that, if you filled that number up with your own escorts and fighters, you could then command tribute from planets - who, not being able to send out any of their defense fleet, were forced to surrender. All you had to do was ask twice.
** The sequels still had caps on the amount of ships that could be present in a star system, but fixed that exploit by mandating that a planet's defense fleet had to be ''destroyed'' for them to surrender. Of course, if you had enough escorts and fighters to almost hit the cap, the planet would send out waves of a ''single'' ship...

* One ridiculous example of this is Harvest Moon DS, which features several mines that go deeper and deeper. The second mine has 255 levels. The third has 999. The fourth ''has 65,535 levels.''

* ''ThePriceIsRight'' also had a cap on the display board for the one bid games. There was only enough room for a dollar sign and 4 digits, which wasn't a problem until some contestants wanted to gain attention by making bids in the tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, or even millions. When the display boards were upgraded to run with more current technology, contestants that make ridiculous bids can have their bids fit on the board.

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** ''VideoGame/DragonAgeII'' has a level cap of 50, but if you do everything, [[AbsurdlyHighLevelCap you'd be somewhere around halfway there.]] It's possible that future DLC will offer opportunities for higher levels.

* Some of the digits become 'nonsense' characters. (This primarily occurs with right-justified displays. [[hottip:Click here for a longer explanation of this phenomenon:With right-justified displays, usually the program starts at the rightmost digit and works leftwards. It divides the value by 10, writes the remainder, and moves left, repeating until it either has a value less than 10 or is at the leftmost position, in which case it simply writes whatever value it has left. Stored somewhere in a contiguous memory array are images of the digits "0" through "9"; to draw each digit, it starts at the "0", skips forward as many images as the digit it's supposed to draw, and draws the image it lands on. In the case of the leftmost digit, it assumes the value should be 9 or less; if it's actually 10 or more, the computer keeps counting past the 9, interprets whatever it lands on as image data, and draws that. Some games have more font data for the alphabet after the digits; in these cases, overflowing a counter that's supposed to cap at (for example) 999 will usually display "A00" for 1000, "B00" for 1100, and so on.]])

* Damage caps usually come into play in ''CaptainSNES'' whenever characters enter into a world with a JRPG system, mainly because Alex is obsessive enough to have leveled his characters as far as they will go. In one particularly interesting example; a [[spoiler: Sorrow-possessed]] [[VideoGame/ChronoTrigger Lucca]] manages to break both her usual health cap (going from 999/999 to 0000/0000), and ''VideoGame/FinalFantasyIV'''s damage cap. However, she doesn't go past 9999 by going into five digits, she does it by using four digits... in ''[[http://www.captainsnes.com/2004/07/22/532/ base sixteen]]''! [[hottip:* : For those who don't want to work out the hexadecimal notation, "[=D6DB=]" comes out to 55003 points of damage.]] Lucca {{Lampshade}}s this in a few comics: "But I did more damage to you than is even ''possible!''"

* ''Psycho Pinball'', in common with most pinball games, had the capacity for astronomical scores; unfortunately, the scoreboard only registered nine digits, so you had to track the number of billions manually. (I have reached three and a half billion a couple of times.)

* The [=TurboGrafx=] pinball game ''Alien Crush'' has a score cap of 999,999,900 points. If you manage to max it out, the entire table explodes and you are given the message [[AWinnerIsYou "Congratulations !! You are the greatest player"]]. After that, the game immediately takes you to the high score list for you to enter your initials.

[[folder:Pinball]]
* Pinball machines from before when score reels were introduced in the 1950s used backlights. The machine could not display more than the highest-valued one.
* Any game that uses score reels will usually just loop back to 0 points (sometimes going to its maximum possible value before that) if the score became more than they could display. Some later games that used four reels would have a "10,000" light to indicate that they had rolled over. Later on, some games with five reels followed suit with a "100,000" light.
* Same with games that use LED score counters, except the cap is usually 6-8 digits.
* Games that use DMDs usually can only display 10 digits before rolling over. Some games that the programmers knew use extreme PinballScoring (like ''Attack From Mars'' or ''Johnny Mnemonic'') can display UpToEleven digits. Usually the high score tables can display more digits.
* The [=TurboGrafx=] pinball game ''Alien Crush'' has a score cap of 999,999,900 points. If you manage to max it out, the entire table explodes and you are given the message [[AWinnerIsYou "Congratulations !! You are the greatest player"]]. After that, the game immediately takes you to the high score list for you to enter your initials.
* ''Street Fighter 2'' was the first (and possibly only) machine to not roll over after reaching the maximum possible score, 9,999,999,990. This is actually easier than you might expect due to the "Double Your Score!" reward (which is [[ExactlyWhatItSaysOnTheTin exactly what it sounds like]]).
* ''Attack From Mars'' rolls around at [[PinballScoring 100 billion]] points. If you go over that, your score will be displayed with leading zeroes, as if the hundred billions digit is cut off (i.e. 100 billion would be 00,000,000,000) but your score will display fully on the high score table and the game will keep track of scores supposedly up to 1 trillion minus ten. It also caps the bonus multiplier at 250x.
* Capcom's ''Break Shot'' has an aversion to this; it [[{{Retraux}} simulates electromagnetic score reels on a DMD]] and has room for 7 digits. However, if you roll the counter it displays "Over The Top x" above the reels; essentially the ten millions place of your score.
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[-[[caption-width-right:332:[[Franchise/TheLegendOfZelda At least now the Rupees max out at four digits these days.]]]]-]

*** Also, the MP ''cost'' of spells was capped to 255, as seen with the Turbo MP materia.
*** ''VideoGame/FinalFantasyVII'' also had a strange effect on percentage damage spells like Demi. Although the visual number was capped, the actual damage was not, so if used on powerful enemies (like Emerald Weapon again) it could be used to bring their HP down to a far more manageable level.

* ''BattleGaregga'' rolls over oddly: the score counter has 7 digits, and when you achieve what is supposed to be 10,000,000 points, instead of the score counter simply maxing out at 9,999,990, it instead continues rising... but now the millions digit is a letter instead of a number, so a score of 10,000,000 will read as "A,000,000," 11 million is "B,000,000," and so on. The world record is somewhere around "G" million points.

** As did nearly every other Creator/DataEast game of that era; it was just really easy with ''Bad Dudes'' (pretty much guaranteed if you played all the way through 1-player). It was possible in ''Sly Spy'' if you were willing to spend some time blowing up respawning mines.