''Full Tilt! Pinball'', known as ''Pinball 95'' in
Europe
Europe is a continent located entirely in the Northern Hemisphere and mostly in the Eastern Hemisphere. It is bordered by the Arctic Ocean to the north, the Atlantic Ocean to the west, the Mediterranean Sea to the south, and Asia to the east ...
, is a 1995
pinball
Pinball games are a family of games in which a ball is propelled into a specially designed table where it bounces off various obstacles, scoring points either en route or when it comes to rest. Historically the board was studded with nails call ...
video game
A video game or computer game is an electronic game that involves interaction with a user interface or input device (such as a joystick, game controller, controller, computer keyboard, keyboard, or motion sensing device) to generate visual fe ...
developed by
Cinematronics
Cinematronics Incorporated was an arcade game video game developer, developer that primarily released vector graphics games in the late 1970s and early 1980s. While other companies released games based on raster graphics, raster displays, early ...
and published by
Maxis
Maxis is an American video game developer and a Division (business), division of Electronic Arts (EA). The studio was founded in 1987 by Will Wright (game designer), Will Wright and Jeff Braun, and acquired by Electronic Arts in 1997. Maxis is ...
.
It features
pre-rendered 3D graphics
3D computer graphics, sometimes called CGI, 3D-CGI or three-dimensional computer graphics, are graphics that use a three-dimensional representation of geometric data (often Cartesian) that is stored in the computer for the purposes of perfor ...
and three tables: ''Space Cadet'', ''Skulduggery'', and ''Dragon's Keep''. A sequel called ''Full Tilt! Pinball 2'' was released in 1996.
A limited version of the game with just the ''Space Cadet'' table was licensed to
Microsoft
Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company, technology conglomerate headquartered in Redmond, Washington. Founded in 1975, the company became influential in the History of personal computers#The ear ...
for inclusion in
Microsoft Plus! and later bundled in multiple versions of the
Windows
Windows is a Product lining, product line of Proprietary software, proprietary graphical user interface, graphical operating systems developed and marketed by Microsoft. It is grouped into families and subfamilies that cater to particular sec ...
operating system with the name ''3D Pinball for Windows – Space Cadet''.
Tables
On each table, side display show the player score, ball number, player number, various other information, and a table-specific image.
''Space Cadet''
The ''Space Cadet'' table features the player as a member of a space fleet that completes missions to increase rank.
Players can attain nine different ranks (listed from lowest to highest): Cadet, Ensign, Lieutenant, Captain, LT Commander, Commander, Commodore, Admiral, and Fleet Admiral. Players accept a mission by hitting "mission targets" which select which mission they will take, and by going up the "launch ramp". Each mission has a set number of things for players to do, such as hitting the "attack bumpers" (which are a set of four bumpers at the top of the table) eight times (this is the "target practice" mission). Some missions involve a number of steps which must be completed in sequence. Missions end either by being completed, or by being aborted due to running out of "fuel", as indicated by the lights in the passage that passes under the launch ramp. The "fuel" lights go out one by one at a time interval, and can be re-lit by having the ball go over them, or all at once by going up the launch ramp again. Upon completing a mission, some of the blue lights in a circle in the middle of the table turn on. When all of the lights in the blue circle turn on, the player's rank increases, and a light in the orange circle turns on.
''Skulduggery''
The ''Skulduggery'' table features a treasure hunt where the player must find pirate Peg Leg's loot.
The player can accomplish that two ways: either by piecing together a treasure map or by activating and completing a series of mini-games on the table called modes. Modes are like missions and quests of the other two tables. They are all pirate themed mini-games, such as ship battle, tavern fight, escape
Bermuda Triangle
The Bermuda Triangle, also known as the Devil's Triangle, is a loosely defined region in the North Atlantic Ocean, roughly bounded by Florida, Bermuda, and Puerto Rico. Since the mid-20th century, it has been the focus of an urban legend sug ...
, mutiny, and sword fight.
''Dragon's Keep''
The ''Dragon's Keep'' table features a fantasy environment where players must accomplish various quests, leading to the slaying of a dragon.
The quests include Dragon Hoard (steal the hoard), Fire Lizard Attack (defeat the fire-lizard), Rescue Maiden (rescue the
damsel in distress
The damsel in distress is a narrative device in which one or more men must rescue a woman who has been kidnapped or placed in other peril. The "damsel" is often portrayed as beautiful, popular, and of high social status; she is usually depicted ...
), Dragon Pass (find the path to dragon's lair), Wizard's Fury, and Slay Dragon. The player can acquire awards such as spells, weapons, and armors. While weapons simply add points to the score, armors and spells temporarily turn on various gates, magnets, and chutes on the table to change the gameplay.
Elements from each of the three tables were elected for representation by Maxis in the illustration for the box art by Marc Ericksen, creating a montage below a hurtling Pinball.
''3D Pinball for Windows – Space Cadet''
A version of the Space Cadet table, known as ''3D Pinball for Windows – Space Cadet'' or simply ''Pinball'', was bundled with
Microsoft Windows
Windows is a Product lining, product line of Proprietary software, proprietary graphical user interface, graphical operating systems developed and marketed by Microsoft. It is grouped into families and subfamilies that cater to particular sec ...
. It was originally packaged with
Microsoft Plus! 95 and later included in
Windows NT 4.0,
Windows 2000
Windows 2000 is a major release of the Windows NT operating system developed by Microsoft, targeting the server and business markets. It is the direct successor to Windows NT 4.0, and was Software release life cycle#Release to manufacturing (RT ...
,
Windows Me
Windows Me (Millennium Edition) is an operating system developed by Microsoft as part of its Windows 9x family of Microsoft Windows operating systems. It was the successor to Windows 98, and was released to manufacturing on June 19, 2000, and t ...
, and
Windows XP
Windows XP is a major release of Microsoft's Windows NT operating system. It was released to manufacturing on August 24, 2001, and later to retail on October 25, 2001. It is a direct successor to Windows 2000 for high-end and business users a ...
.
Windows XP was the last client release of Windows to include this game.
The look and feel of ''Full Tilt! Pinball'' and ''3D Pinball'' are similar, with a few exceptions: The latter contains only the ''Space Cadet'' table and only supports 640×480-pixel resolution, while the former supports three different resolutions up to 1024×768 pixels. The image on the side is a two-dimensional image as opposed to pre-rendered 3D. The words ''Maxis'' and ''Cinematronics'' have been changed from the yellow to a dark red, making them harder to see. It sports a
splash screen that merely says ''3D Pinball'' and shows a small pinball graphic with faded edges. Music is not enabled by default in ''3D Pinball''. It has only one soundtrack.
There are only a few minor differences between the gameplay of the two versions. The completion of a mission in the Maxis version results in a replay—actually a ball save, rather than a
special—being awarded. In addition, hitting a wormhole that has the same color light locks the ball, which if done repeatedly activates the
multi-ball round. This is not the case in ''3D Pinball'': completing a mission merely awards bonus points and hitting a wormhole in the above circumstances awards a replay. Also, the three yellow lights above the bumpers (both in the launch ramp and in the upper table zone) act differently: in ''3D Pinball'' these are turned off if the ball passes on them while they are on. This is not the case in the original game, where they just remain activated.
The
Windows 98
Windows 98 is a consumer-oriented operating system developed by Microsoft as part of its Windows 9x family of Microsoft Windows operating systems. It was the second operating system in the 9x line, as the successor to Windows 95. It was Software ...
installation
CD has instructions on installing Pinball which are partly wrong; Microsoft later issued an updated support article.
Discontinuation
According to Microsoft employee Raymond Chen, ''3D Pinball for Windows – Space Cadet'' was first removed from later releases of Windows due to a collision detection bug during early development of 64-bit versions of Windows.
Microsoft was unable to resolve the issue in time for the release of
Windows XP 64-Bit Edition for the
Itanium
Itanium (; ) is a discontinued family of 64-bit computing, 64-bit Intel microprocessors that implement the Intel Itanium architecture (formerly called IA-64). The Itanium architecture originated at Hewlett-Packard (HP), and was later jointly dev ...
architecture in 2001,
and it was assumed for some time to be the reason for the game's absence from
Windows Vista
Windows Vista is a major release of the Windows NT operating system developed by Microsoft. It was the direct successor to Windows XP, released five years earlier, which was then the longest time span between successive releases of Microsoft W ...
and subsequent versions.
However, the 2005 release of
Windows XP Professional x64 Edition
Windows XP Professional x64 Edition is an edition of Microsoft's Windows XP operating system that supports the x86-64 architecture. It was released on April 25, 2005, alongside the x86-64 versions of Windows Server 2003.
Windows XP Profession ...
includes an official 64-bit build of Pinball, which was found to have only minor graphical glitches. A
YouTube
YouTube is an American social media and online video sharing platform owned by Google. YouTube was founded on February 14, 2005, by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim who were three former employees of PayPal. Headquartered in ...
investigation revealed working versions of 64-bit Pinball are also found on the
CD-ROM
A CD-ROM (, compact disc read-only memory) is a type of read-only memory consisting of a pre-pressed optical compact disc that contains computer data storage, data computers can read, but not write or erase. Some CDs, called enhanced CDs, hold b ...
for the 2003 update of
Windows XP 64-Bit Edition and even in some
early Windows Vista builds (then known as "Longhorn") for both
IA-64
IA-64 (Intel Itanium architecture) is the instruction set architecture (ISA) of the discontinued Itanium family of 64-bit Intel microprocessors. The basic ISA specification originated at Hewlett-Packard (HP), and was subsequently implemented by ...
and
x64.
Chen clarified in a follow-up post that the 64-Bit Edition of Windows XP was developed on the
Alpha AXP, as Itanium hardware did not exist at the time, and it was on this hardware that the collision bug was present. He theorized that the C runtime team or the compiler team fixed the issue at some point and Pinball was added back to the product.
The final versions of Windows to include the game were the first released builds after the reset of the Longhorn project to start over with a fresh codebase, now for
x86
x86 (also known as 80x86 or the 8086 family) is a family of complex instruction set computer (CISC) instruction set architectures initially developed by Intel, based on the 8086 microprocessor and its 8-bit-external-bus variant, the 8088. Th ...
and
x64 only.
These builds are also the final ones to feature the other original Windows games from earlier versions, as opposed to the completely redesigned ones by
Oberon Games that were publicly introduced in build 5219. This has led to speculation that, like the classic versions of the other games, Pinball was ultimately removed from Windows due to its visual style being considered outdated.
In late 2018, Raymond Chen stated that there were multiple attempts to revive the game as a
Microsoft Garage project. They were apparently successful in repackaging the x86 version, but as Microsoft contacted the legal department to review the original license contract, it was found that newer versions of the game were only permitted to be released pre-packaged with subsequent Windows operating systems and
Microsoft Plus! packs. The license also forbade the release of the source code.
Reverse Engineering and Porting
In 2020, developer Muzychenko Andrey started
decompiling and reverse-engineering the ''Space Cadet''-only version of the version of the game included with Windows, unofficially porting it to
C++ on top of
Simple DirectMedia Layer. This allowed the game to be played natively on multiple platforms including on Mac OS,
Linux
Linux ( ) is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an kernel (operating system), operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically package manager, pac ...
, and newer versions of Windows, in addition to
browsers,
Android,
LG webOS,
Wii,
Wii U
The Wii U ( ) is a home video game console developed by Nintendo as the successor to the Wii. Released in late 2012, it is the first eighth-generation video game console and competed with Microsoft's Xbox One and Sony's PlayStation 4.
The W ...
,
3DS, and
PlayStation Vita
The PlayStation Vita (PS Vita) is a handheld game console developed and marketed by Sony Computer Entertainment. It was first released in Japan on December 17, 2011, then in other international territories on February 22, 2012, and was produced ...
, among others.
Development
Cinematronics was established as a dedicated Windows developer studio during a period when video games were predominantly developed for
MS-DOS
MS-DOS ( ; acronym for Microsoft Disk Operating System, also known as Microsoft DOS) is an operating system for x86-based personal computers mostly developed by Microsoft. Collectively, MS-DOS, its rebranding as IBM PC DOS, and a few op ...
. In 1994, the company began development of a port of
Doom. David Stafford proposed the game, with the violence toned down and renamed to ''Gluem'', to Microsoft's
Alex St. John for inclusion in the upcoming Windows 95 operating system. However, Windows 95 head David Cole was not impressed with the concept and remarked, "Can't we just get a game of pinball or something like that?". St. John relayed the suggestion to Stafford, who the following day presented a brief of a game titled ''Pinball Wizard'' to Microsoft, who expressed interest in seeing the game. Since it was merely a concept, the team had to create a preliminary table design within a few days which they then faxed it to Microsoft, who approved it.
Windows 95 was targeting a release in early 1995, giving the team about nine months to produce a finished product, which pressured development. In December, the launch was delayed to August 1995, giving additional time to polish the game. Six months into development, the deal with Microsoft was formalised. In May 1995, Cinematronics secured a deal with Maxis for ''Full Tilt! Pinball'' with an additional two tables.
Product manager Kevin Gliner was responsible for the game's rules, scoring, and layout. He visited
penny arcades to study the design of tables and their components, and looked into the history of pinball to understand how the tables had evolved.
A fully 3D game was considered, but for simplicity it was ultimately decided to make a 2D
top-down game with pre-rendered 3D graphics. Ryan Medeiros, the lead visual designer, used photos of various pinball machines found in
Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk
The Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk is an oceanfront amusement park in Santa Cruz, California. Founded in 1907, it is California's oldest surviving amusement park and one of the few seaside parks on the West Coast of the United States.
Description
...
for reference. The game's pre-rendered assets were created using
TrueSpace, but were then shifted to an MS-DOS-based 3D program for easier programming. The table's design, as well as animations were created using
Adobe Photoshop
Adobe Photoshop is a raster graphics editor developed and published by Adobe Inc., Adobe for Microsoft Windows, Windows and macOS. It was created in 1987 by Thomas Knoll, Thomas and John Knoll. It is the most used tool for professional digital ...
.
Initial programming was done in
Delphi
Delphi (; ), in legend previously called Pytho (Πυθώ), was an ancient sacred precinct and the seat of Pythia, the major oracle who was consulted about important decisions throughout the ancient Classical antiquity, classical world. The A ...
, which was later translated to C/C++ when the licensing deal with Microsoft was certain. The game also included portions of x86 assembly language. The physics engine was built by Mike Sandige, designed to be almost entirely data-driven. A scripting system was implemented to allow Sandige and Gliner to fine-tune the physics and materials of components. Particular attention was paid to the flippers, making them as realistic as possible while not being overly demanding on the hardware, and ensuring the ball would never pass through.
Following the release of ''3D Pinball for Windows'', Gliner received feedback from a designer of physical pinball tables, recommending adjustments such as the rollover light toggle and the flipper angle. These enhancements were incorporated into the ''Full Tilt!'' release.
On Microsoft's end, executive
Jim Allchin
James Edward Allchin (born 1951, Grand Rapids, Michigan, United States) is an American computer scientist, philanthropist and guitarist best known for being a former Microsoft executive.
He assisted Microsoft in creating many of the system plat ...
wanted to showcase the new graphics and sound APIs in the next release of
Windows NT
Windows NT is a Proprietary software, proprietary Graphical user interface, graphical operating system produced by Microsoft as part of its Windows product line, the first version of which, Windows NT 3.1, was released on July 27, 1993. Original ...
, so it was decided to include ''3D Pinball'' in
Windows NT 4.0, despite NT being oriented towards businesses at the time. Microsoft engineer
Dave Plummer was responsible for converting existing x86 portions, such as the sound engine, to C/C++, to make the game compatible with the
Alpha
Alpha (uppercase , lowercase ) is the first letter of the Greek alphabet. In the system of Greek numerals, it has a value of one. Alpha is derived from the Phoenician letter ''aleph'' , whose name comes from the West Semitic word for ' ...
,
MIPS and
PowerPC
PowerPC (with the backronym Performance Optimization With Enhanced RISC – Performance Computing, sometimes abbreviated as PPC) is a reduced instruction set computer (RISC) instruction set architecture (ISA) created by the 1991 Apple Inc., App ...
versions of NT 4.0.
Later on,
Raymond Chen
Raymond Tsong-he Chen (born 1968) is an American lawyer who has served as a United States circuit judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit since 2013.
Early life and education
Chen was born in 1968 in New York City ...
implemented a frame-rate cap to reduce the CPU usage of the game, which he would later describe as his proudest Windows XP feature.
Sequel
''Full Tilt! Pinball 2'' is the sequel to ''Full Tilt! Pinball''. It was released on October 31, 1996, with the introduction of three new tables: ''Mad Scientist'', ''Alien Daze'' and ''Captain Hero''.
Reception
Reviewing the Windows version, a reviewer for ''
Next Generation'' said that while the ''Space Cadet'' table is fairly good, the other two tables suffer from cluttered graphics and weak ball physics. He gave it two out of five stars. Todd Vaughn of
PC Gamer
''PC Gamer'' is a magazine and website founded in the United Kingdom in 1993 devoted to PC gaming and published monthly by Future plc. The magazine has several regional editions, with the UK and US editions becoming the best selling PC games m ...
gave it a score of 86%, praising the graphics and sound effects but criticising the lack of tables.
''3D Pinball Space Cadet'' was cited to be among the computer games popularly played by school children in the Philippines in the 2000s, alongside
Solitaire
Solitaire may refer to:
Film and television
*'' Le Solitaire'', a 1987 French film
* ''Solitaire'' (1991 film), a Canadian drama film
* ''Solitaire'' (2008 film), a drama film
*''Solitaire'', 2016 Lebanese comedy film with Bassam Kousa
*"Solit ...
and
Minesweeper
A minesweeper is a small warship designed to remove or detonate naval mines. Using various mechanisms intended to counter the threat posed by naval mines, minesweepers keep waterways clear for safe shipping.
History
The earliest known usage of ...
.
Tutorials showing how to install it on modern versions of Microsoft Windows have been published.
In popular culture
In March 2020, the sound effects of Space Cadet were sampled in a song, "You Better Move" by
Lil Uzi Vert, containing elements from the game.
It captured positive reception from many fans who grew up playing the game.
See also
*
List of games included with Windows
Video games have been included in versions of the Microsoft Windows line of operating systems, starting from Windows 1.0, all published by Microsoft. Some games that have appeared in ''Microsoft Entertainment Pack'' and Microsoft Plus! have been ...
References
External links
*
*
''Full Tilt! Pinball'' Windows 95 demoDecompilation
{{Microsoft Windows components
1995 video games
Cinematronics, LLC games
Classic Mac OS games
Discontinued Windows components
Electronic Arts franchises
Maxis games
Microsoft games
Multiplayer and single-player video games
Multiplayer hotseat games
Pinball video games
Science fiction video games
Video games developed in the United States
Video games set in outer space
Windows 95
Windows games