After installing Vista in 2007, users were shocked to discover that Windows was missing the legendary pinball game Space Cadet.
01/16/2023 – For some, Super Mario, Galaga and Contra, while for others, Solitaire, Minesweeper and 3D Pinball are great classics. I admit I loved them all, at least as much as I jumped with the mustachioed plumber, at least as much as I tried to deal out French cards, or tried to break the family record at pinball.
What's more, Microsoft's pre-installed games built into Windows have stolen their way into the hearts of even those who've never played any games before — at least not in digital form. By the way, this is a separate story that Redmond residents nostalgically tell on their official YouTube channel.
Accordingly, the legendary Solitaire and Minesweeper were added to the operating system in 1992 to teach users how to use a mouse. Before then, this type of peripheral was not very common, which meant that the average user had to be shown how to use it. The card game Minesweeper was ideal for this purpose, because they could be played most effectively with a mouse.
3D Pinball – Space Cadet Came later, in 1995, the next big release, Windows 95 Plus! Packed next to him.
Everyone remembers Windows Pinball simply as Windows Pinball, but in reality it was a completely standalone game, or rather an alternative version of it. The 3D Pinball game that first came with the operating system in 1995 was originally Cinematronics Full Tilt! His Pinball game had one of its tracks, Space Cadet, rewritten in C++ for Windows by a Microsoft programmer, David Plummer.
At first glance, the pinball game turned out to be an almost exact copy of the original, especially since they could use the already existing graphics and sounds, but some elements of the game were either missing or worked differently. Other than that, 3D Pinball – Space Cadet was almost identical to Full Tilt, as if it were a demo version of it.
3D Pinball became such a crazy game, and users loved it, that it quickly joined Solitaire and Minesweeper as the popular pinball game built into Windows. Therefore, it was added as a core extension for later operating systems: after 1995, it was also included in the Windows NT 4.0, Windows 2000, Windows ME, and Windows XP packages.
Solitaire Minesweeper entered the Video Game Hall of Fame, while 3D Pinball was forgotten.
The legendary Windows XP was the last operating system to have pinball pre-installed. I'm not saying the loss of Vista in 2007 was due to the lack of 3D Pinball, but it certainly could have been a warning sign – at least for users. But what happened?
At first, many people thought that there might have been some sort of legal dispute between Microsoft and Cinematronics, or their publisher at the time, Maxis. And there was some basis for this: Raymond Chen, an engineer at Microsoft, claimed in 2012 that they could no longer save the game due to the transition from Vista to 64-bit, but this was also strange because the x64 version of Windows XP Professional – With some minor graphical glitches, however – it still includes a 64-bit version of 3D Pinball.
They tried to save this in the first versions of Vista, which ran under the codename Longhorn, but as it turned out, development of the system was resumed at one point with a completely new code base. Since it was not Chan, but a former colleague who wrote the original code for the game, he simply did not understand the uncommented program in many places, which created additional difficulties during porting.
In particular, there was a bug that caused the ball to simply pass through the track elements, and no one at the company could fix that, but they couldn't even find the lines related to the bumpers.
Although they probably could have solved everything in time, it would have been so time-consuming and resource-intensive that they decided not to rewrite the popular pinball game for Vista or anything else. Since then, it has not appeared as a pre-installed game in any subsequent Windows operating system.
Finally, I added two fun facts:
- Despite the difficulties, Microsoft has not given up on saving/rewriting 3D Pinball – Space Cadet. In fact, at one point in the 2000s, they seemed to be successful, but then legal problems arose as stipulated in the original licensing agreement.
- Windows XP is not far behind. During the rewrite, it turned out that the hardware is so advanced compared to the game, that the pinball machine runs at over 1,000,000 FPS on XP. This did not make it inoperable, but it put an unrealistic burden on the device and especially the processor. This problem was then solved by adding a frame rate limiter.
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