Whatever happened to Minesweeper and 3D Pinball on Windows?
Remember back in the day when you could install Windows 98 or Windows 7 on a PC and enjoy built-in goodies like Solitaire, Minesweeper, FreeCell, Hearts, and 3D Pinball: Space Cadet? What happened to all these games and why aren’t they available in Windows 11?
Windows Latest recently did a deep dive into this question and found that the decisive changes occurred with the universally unpopular Windows 8. Instead of bundling these games with Windows as they’d done before, Microsoft shifted them over to the Microsoft Store.
The company then backtracked a little bit with Windows 10, which came bundled with the Solitaire Collection, but the rest still had to be downloaded separately. (You may have noticed that Windows 11 also only comes with the Microsoft Solitaire Collection.)
Maybe this whole thing isn’t a huge deal in the big picture, but it was light-hearted fun to have these games available right from the get-go. In the years since, Microsoft has increasingly pushed Windows users towards the Xbox if they want to game, all while leaving behind iconic titles like 3D Pinball: Space Cadet due to technical difficulties.
According to Microsoft veteran Raymond Chen, 3D Pinball was discontinued due to the migration from 32-bit to 64-bit:
One of the things I did in Windows XP was port several millions of lines of code from 32-bit to 64-bit Windows so that we could ship Windows XP 64-bit Edition. But one of the programs that ran into trouble was Pinball. The 64-bit version of Pinball had a pretty nasty bug where the ball would simply pass through other objects like a ghost. In particular, when you started the game, 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.
[…]
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. We just made the executive decision right there to drop Pinball from the product.
Further reading: Windows 11 still runs on code from the 1990s
