Why was Pinball removed with Windows Vista? Turns out it wasn’t because of licensing. In 2007, when Microsoft released the beautiful Windows Vista, it dropped one of Windows XP’s most nostalgic built-in games: 3D Pinball for Windows - -Space Cadet. For years, people speculated that Pinball disappeared because of legal or licensing issues. But according to Microsoft, that was not the reason! Microsoft explained that during the Windows XP 64-bit porting effort, Microsoft had to move millions of lines of code from 32-bit to 64-bit Windows. Pinball was one of the apps that caused trouble. The 64-bit version had a bizarre bug where the ball would pass straight through objects, including the plunger and the table itself. “Games tended to be really short.” - MS The real problem was that Pinball’s code had been written years earlier by an outside company, and nobody at Microsoft properly understood how it worked anymore. MS couldn’t even find the collision detector, let alone fix the floating-point or physics bug causing the ball to behave like a ghost. At that point, Microsoft still had millions of lines of code left to port. But spending days reverse-engineering an old game was not worth delaying the operating system. So Microsoft made the call to remove Pinball... and now the company has stopped bundling entertainment/games stuff with Windows 11 due to a shift in its strategy. I'd love it if Windows 11 shipped with Pinball-like games again! Operating systems need to be fun again..