The REAL Story On Why Space Cadet Pinball Was Removed (ft. Windows on Itanium)

NOTE: This video was done BEFORE Dave Garage's video went out (it had been out for sponsors for about 12 hours). I decided to kick it out early because I already got a slew of comments about it, plus Dave's quotes Raymond Chen who's post is ... well, it's not the full story.

I was one of the original authors of Space Cadet pinball. I don't have direct knowledge of the back story behind why it was removed so I can't add anything there but I want to say that I am very impressed with the thoroughness of your research.

The Itanium was widely known throughout the industry at the time as the "Itanic", because everyone could see that it was sinking beneath the waves.

I bet Microsoft never expected anyone to dedicate so much effort into a pre-installed game either

the idea of pinball being removed because of its outdated aesthetics makes so much more sense now that i think about it, can't believe i never thought of that before

Space Cadet was a surprisingly good pinball game that still holds up. I have purchased pinball games for multiple consoles and PC over the years and often find myself disappointed when comparing graphics, sound, controls, and performance to that old free pinball game. Most games I have paid money for are not as good as Space Cadet.

Outstanding video. It's fascinating how deep this rabbit hole goes. When I was making the XP x64 video I was pretty surprised to see a working 64-bit version of game, having read Raymond's blog post before. So I began to think he was referring to the Itanium releases of XP. And well..... I won't spoil the rest for those who haven't watched the full video yet. The conclusion you came to sounds like the most plausible reason to me. As a side note, the development story behind Pinball is super interesting as well. I made a video a few years back going over it. TL;DR: Cinematronics (the developers) proposed the game to Microsoft without having even started work on it yet after their idea to develop a Windows 95 port of Doom fell through. Yeah... that Doom. They only had 9 months to develop Pinball to get it done in time for the release of Windows 95, and as you can imagine the programmers were quite overworked during that time. This explains what Raymond said in his blog post about the code being uncommented and hard for the Microsoft developers to understand. According to one of the employees of Cinematronics, the agreement they signed with Microsoft allowed the game to be bundled with Windows or Microsoft Plus! They chose to bundle it with Plus! 95 originally, but then included it with the OS itself for later Windows releases. A lot of people miscredit Maxis as the company who came to the agreement with Microsoft (and this can be attributed to the about screen making no mention of Cinematronics), but from my understanding the deal was already done long before Maxis came into the picture. Although they did publish Full Tilt Pinball (the "full" version of the game as you mentioned), and eventually bought out Cinematronics entirely and renamed it Maxis South. Anyways, it's great to finally have some more insight on the whole 64-bit situation. Thanks for dedicating so much time to this!

I've played so much of this game that seeing the ball clipping through the paddle was one of the most painful things I've ever witnessed in a videogame.

I have a warm place in my heart for this game because I held the highest score at my middle school. Just got the ball rested on the left flipper, then released Z and pressed Z again with great timing consistency to go up the 2nd level ramp in a loop. There's a good ~4 vectors the ball can come off the flipper and still make the ramp.

They should have at least made a new pinball game for Vista built in house. And subsequently for Windows 8 and 10. It was the funnest game out of the box.

You had me in stitches with "It's never a good sign when you need to debug your debugger..." at 12:00-ish!

11:12 I sincerely hope you decided to send that error report. And I sincerely hope that when you did, some Microsoft employee ended up scratching their heads as to why is somebody trying to play Space Cadet Pinball on this piece of hardware, on this operating system, that didn't even ship with it.

I remembered my science teacher having this on his pc in my middle school. He would play this all the time when we were taking quizzes and tests. I felt like this game holds a lot of good memories for everyone who played it and it was unfair Windows took it away.

I'm blown away by the level of effort and detail you have gone into here. An amazing piece of work!

Finally something I can talk about on my Date tonight.

This was the only game everyone used to play back in primary school, on the school computers. We were all so serious about our scores 😅. Good times.

I love how this story goes from just a pinball story to one that meanders through the Itanium. Nicely done.

Space Cadet Pinball was my childhood. Only reason why is that my parents never bothered getting a new computer, so we had a dinky old pc that ran windows xp.

Itanium is a very interesting object lesson in how not to implement parallelism in a general purpose processor architecture. I used to be a compiler developer and got the complete documentation on the IA64. Trying to work out optimum code generation for the thing pretty much required modeling separate pipelines for different ALUs, scheduling them based on dependencies, and then merging them into a single stream. What was good on one Itanium might be terrible on another flavor because the timing might be different. There is some of this for any out-of-order multiple issue pipeline superscalar, but not nearly as hard to grasp as the Itanium.

when you said "By looking at the installation manifest from other versions of windows , I can determine all files necessary to install pinball by hand" gave me a heart attack and the pain it would take for you to look at manifest. It sucks a lot. You are a goddamn legend