The other day I remembered how Space Cadet Pinball used to be installed on every Windows machine as a matter of course. If you used Windows 95 or, later, Windows XP, you had this little pinball game with you all the time. Today that looks very different: on modern systems, you’ll look for Space Cadet Pinball in vain.
Space Cadet Pinball on Linux
Luckily, there are projects that keep the game alive. The source code is now available under a free license, only the graphics remain proprietary. On Linux, Space Cadet Pinball is very easy to install, for example via Flathub. If you have Flatpak set up on your system, a mouse click or a simple command is all it takes:
$ <strong>flatpak install flathub com.github.k4zmu2a.spacecadetpinball</strong>If the default controls don’t suit your keyboard layout, you can change the key bindings under Options | Controls. The resolution doesn’t change, though: the “modern” version still runs at 640 × 480 pixels.
Why Space Cadet Pinball disappeared
So why did Space Cadet Pinball actually vanish from Windows? The reasons are technical. The game was originally part of Windows 95 and stayed in Windows until XP. With Windows Vista, it dropped out of the default installation. One of the main reasons was the move to 64-bit architectures: early 64-bit systems like Intel’s Itanium were difficult to work with. Development environments often ran only in emulators, and real hardware was scarce.
Microsoft therefore temporarily switched to Alpha AXP processors, which could handle both 32-bit and 64-bit code. When the developers later moved to Itanium, though, they found a serious bug in the collision detection. For a pinball game of all things, that is a real problem. To save time and effort, Space Cadet Pinball was eventually removed from Windows Vista. Even though the bug was fixed later, the game stayed gone.
Outdated Resolution and the Ravages of Time
Another reason for the end of Space Cadet Pinball was probably its design. The game was optimized for a resolution of 640×480 pixels, so on modern screens it looked pretty old. Microsoft most likely just had no interest in maintaining a technically outdated game any longer.
If you want the whole story, check out Ncommander’s YouTube video, which covers the development of Space Cadet Pinball in detail. Raymond Chen, who worked on many projects at Microsoft back then, also shares his experiences there.
Space Cadet Pinball lives on
Today, Space Cadet Pinball lives on thanks to the community. Besides the Flatpak version, there are also web ports that you can play right in your browser. Projects like this show impressively how open source keeps old software from being forgotten, no matter which platform it ran on or what the big vendors decide.
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