Full Tilt! Pinball

Lore & Background

Cinematronics was established as a dedicated Windows developer studio during a period when video games were predominantly developed for MS-DOS. In 1994, the company began development of a Doom-like first person shooter. 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 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. Since it was merely a concept, the team had to create a preliminary table design within a few days which they then faxed 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. 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. The game's pre-rendered assets were created using TrueSpace, then shifted to an MS-DOS-based 3D program. Initial programming was done in Delphi, later translated to C/C++ when the licensing deal with Microsoft was certain.

Reader's Guide

Full Tilt! Pinball's significance lies in its role as the foundation for 3D Pinball for Windows – Space Cadet, which became one of the most widely played computer games due to its inclusion in Microsoft Windows. The game's development history illustrates how a casual remark by a Microsoft executive led to a pinball game being bundled with an operating system. The Space Cadet table, with its rank progression system and missions, became iconic. The game also demonstrates early use of pre-rendered 3D graphics in a 2D top-down pinball simulation. Its physics engine, built by Mike Sandige, was designed to be almost entirely data-driven, with a scripting system for fine-tuning. Following the release of 3D Pinball for Windows, Gliner received feedback from a physical pinball table designer, leading to enhancements incorporated into the Full Tilt! release. The game was later removed from Windows due to a collision issue, as noted by Microsoft employee Raymond Chen. The Windows 98 installation CD had incorrect instructions for installing Pinball, referring to a non-existent setup file.

Did You Know?

• The game was originally proposed to Microsoft as a concept called Pinball Wizard.
• The Space Cadet table allows players to attain nine different ranks, from Cadet to Fleet Admiral.
• The Windows 98 installation CD had wrong instructions for installing Pinball, referencing a non-existent PINBALL.EXE file.
• Microsoft engineer Dave Plummer converted x86 portions of the game to C/C++ to make it compatible with Alpha, MIPS, and PowerPC versions of Windows NT 4.0.