The thought just occurred to me - many DMD-era games have a "Big Points" award, often as a random award from a mystery shot. Typically, the value of "Big Points" is laughably small when considered as a portion of a "good" score, for example, in Cirqus Voltaire the Big Points award from the Side Show is either 250,000 or 500,000 points. If the replay score were set to 20,000,000, a 500,000 point Big Points award would only be 2.5% of the way to the replay - hardly "big." So I was just wondering - does anyone know if this is an intentional inside joke by designers? Is there any history behind it?

Agreed, those are always funny. I also always love getting 10 points from Odd Change in TZ or Water Hazard in NGG. And yes, both have actually happened to me while playing.

Good point - in the little bit of research I did on this, LOTR was one of the few examples I could find where Big Points was actually reasonably big.