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Windows Vista Dropped Space Cadet Pinball Because Its 64-Bit Port Let the Ball Fall Straight Through the Plunger
Microsoft's Raymond Chen says Pinball left Windows after XP because the 64-bit build's collision detection broke, the ball fell through the table, and nobody could find the collision code in the uncommented, licensed source.
Chen was porting “several millions of lines of code from 32-bit to 64-bit Windows” for Windows XP 64-bit Edition when Pinball broke. “The 64-bit version of Pinball had a pretty nasty bug where the ball would simply pass through other objects like a ghost,” he wrote. Start a game and the ball “would be delivered to the launcher, and then it would slowly fall towards the bottom of the screen, through the plunger, and out the bottom of the table.”
His review of the result: “Games tended to be really short.”
The game wasn’t Microsoft’s own code. It was “written several years earlier by an outside company,” nobody at Microsoft “ever understood how the code worked,” and “most of the code was completely uncommented.” Two of them tried to debug it. “Heck, we couldn’t even find the collision detector!”
The math didn’t work either. “We had several million lines of code still to port, so we couldn’t afford to spend days studying the code trying to figure out what obscure floating point rounding error was causing collision detection to fail.” So: “We just made the executive decision right there to drop Pinball from the product.”
Chen wrote that up in 2012 to knock down a rumor that the game was pulled for legal reasons. “No, that’s not why.” He added that he was “saddened by this as much as you are,” and told everyone asking for the source that it “was licensed from another company. If you want the source code, you have to go ask them.”
He had a soft spot for it. Years earlier, Chen named his favorite Windows XP work as fixing Pinball’s CPU use. The Windows 95-era game “had a render loop that simply painted frames as fast as possible,” and on XP-era hardware he found it running at “over one million frames per second.” A 120 fps cap dropped CPU use “from 100% to 1%.”
Then the retro crowd went looking. Retrocomputing enthusiast NCommander tested every 64-bit Windows version he could find, to prove or disprove Chen’s story.
Play the video on YouTubeChen answered in a 2022 follow-up, calling it “a Zapruder-level analysis,” but said NCommander missed “the one that’s relevant to the story.” Before Itanium hardware existed, Microsoft ported Windows to 64-bit on the Alpha AXP, a version that “would never ship.” “And that’s the system that had the broken collision detector.”
NCommander did find a collision bug on Itanium, but Chen said it was “nowhere as severe as the one that existed on the Alpha AXP.” His best guess is a rounding-mode problem in the C runtime that someone later fixed, after which “they put Pinball back.” He only guesses, he wrote, “because nobody informed me that they had gotten Pinball working and added it back.” Who fixed it, and when, is still nobody’s public record.
The pattern likely repeats in any big migration: the small, old, outside piece nobody owns is the first thing cut, because nobody can afford to learn it under a deadline. Expect the same choice on every port where an orphaned dependency sits in the way, and expect fans to keep asking for it back. What nobody has said publicly is who got Pinball working again afterward.