14 DAY TRIAL // If you’re still running Windows XP, and statistics confirm that there still are plenty of consumers using the 11-year-old operating system, chances are that you love the built-in Pinball game.
Sadly for users of any other Windows version released after XP, this game isn’t available anymore and even though it was initially believed that it’s all because of legal reasons, it’s not.
A Microsoft post on The Old New Thing explains that Microsoft decided to remove Pinball from Windows Vista and its successors due to porting issues from 32-bit platforms to 64-bit builds.
“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,” the blog post reads.
Microsoft initially tried to debug the application and make it work on newer Windows operating systems, but apparently it was taking too much time because the game was actually created by a third-party company, and not by Microsoft itself.
So developers had a really hard time trying to figure out how the code worked. “We couldn't even find the collision detector!” Raymond Chen, a software engineer who worked on this project, explained in the same blog post published a few hours ago.
In the end, the company decided to drop Pinball from the operating system, mostly due to the fact that updating it to work on newer Windows versions could take too much time.
And we all know that Vista has been delayed several times, so doing it one more time just because of a game was pretty much impossible.