Decided to open my Amiga emulator and play one of my favorites from my teenage years. If you've never played this game, you'll be surprised when you do. 4 tables. It feels surprisingly realistic. The ball moves like on a real pinball table. The music is very late 80s early 90s, of course!
That was my favorite Windows game that came with the OS. I wonder why they removed it? Is it because they wanted to sell it as Full Tilt?
It was fundamentally broken in 64-bit Windows for a long time due to a practically unfindable bug, so they just removed it once that was a mainstream option (Vista onwards).
I think it's been fixed or recreated now though?
Full Tilt! was first published in 1995, comfortably before the inclusion of the Space Cadet table in Windows, which iirc was either '98 or Plus! for '95. I'm confident it wasn't in any of the vanilla releases of Win 95.
There is an open source port that works natively on Windows, Linux and other platforms. I played it quite a bit :)
Interesting note in the project readme:
Oh wow, that's so cool I almost popped a boner! Thanks! If you're a man, I'm sorry. My boner isn't for you, it's for the valuable information about what the hell happened to that pinball game, which quite frankly entertained me in my office during office hours for a stretch. LMAO.
OK, I wasn't clear on that. So, Full Tilt! was available before the pinball game was included with Windows. How much work would it have taken Microsoft to adapt their pinball game to 64 bit machines? I mean, come on, what kind of excuse is that? They updated Solitaire and added word games. Silly Microsoft.