According to some research I did a few years back, EA currently owns the rights to Full Tilt! Pinball, which is what 3D Pinball Space Cadet was based on.
EA, if you have a single shred of decency, open source Pinball!
From what I've heard from videos by Microsoft devs on why it was dropped between XP and Vista, the source code is obtuse and very difficult to port/work on.
Microsoft devs also claimed that making cmd faster would require years of research, but someone did that in a weekend by making it run on a GPU. I'm sure there's someone out there that would solve every problem Space Cadet has within a week, just for fun.
Can confirm. I've been on both sides of that fence.
I worked on a product about a decade ago which had an unnecessarily complicated custom layout system written in javascript. CSS was missing a lot of features at the time, so we figured we'd roll our own. It was crazy complicated - and it had all these weird easy to reproduce bugs.
For fun, some pesky kid on twitter took our insanely layout system and reimplemented 95% of it in a couple hundred lines of (almost) pure CSS. At a glance, it looked identical to our product - but the code was small, clean and fast. The link got passed around the office. It was amazing how many reasons people had to dismiss it. "Ah, see - it doesn't even do this weird custom behaviour we have!" or "Well and good in chrome - but it doesn't work properly on IE8!" and so on. I've never seen a better example of motivated reasoning, before or since.
What we should have done is reach out and offer that kid a job.
The smartest programmer on your team isn't as smart as the smartest programmer on the internet.
All you have said is that it's easy to write something that takes you 90% there and ignores the last 10% of requirements. I worked in webdev some 15 years ago and if I could have dropped IE support sooner my code would have been so much simpler as well :)
Thing that's hard to communicate is that Vista was moving away from how older versions of Windows rendered their desktop and past art styles. With Pinball originally from Windows 95, porting it to leverage Vista's new graphics paradigm on top of the artstyle was probably too much work for a pack in game.
Though I do wish they contracted out a clone of Pinball instead of Purble Place.
EA, if you have a single shred of decency, open source Pinball!