By Abhijith M B
Publication Date: 2026-08-22 11:15:00
Windows XP was the last version of Windows to ship with 3D Pinball, the space-themed game that had lived inside Windows since 1995. It disappeared with Windows Vista, and for years, we assumed legal trouble killed it. The real reason was far more human, for lack of a better word. It was a bug nobody could find in code nobody understood, all while having a looming deadline.
The story comes from Raymond Chen, a Microsoft engineer who has spent more than three decades working on Windows and writes about its history on his blog, The Old New Thing. Chen was part of the team that ported Windows XP to 64-bit, and he was there when Pinball got cut.
I first played 3D Pinball on a Windows XP machine at home, probably more than 20 years ago, and I remember losing whole afternoons to it. It was one of those games that was there on…
