Windows pack-in classic Space Cadet Pinball has been unofficially ported to Android devices—and it’s free

What came before the iPad baby? Well, with both parents working various IT systems jobs throughout my youth, in my case I was always destined to become a desktop gremlin. Hastening that descent were a number of games, but the accessibility of 3D Pinball for Windows – Space Cadet was the one that probably annoyed my folks the most. First packaged alongside Windows 95, there’s no need to dig out an old machine for a nostalgic game of pinball.

Space Cadet Pinball is now available for free on the Google Play Android app store (via PCWorld). It’s very much still the game you remember, completely free of modern mobile dreadfulness such as microtransactions or in-app ads. The Android port’s developer, Kyle Sylvestre, has added online leaderboards so you can compete on high scores, though otherwise an online connection isn’t even necessary to play.

However, as this is a port for your smartphone, you are stuck tapping an on-screen control overlay. ‘Touch screens were a mistake’ aside, it’s also worth underlining this isn’t an official port by Microsoft (or indeed the long since defunct Cinematronics), but a project by a lone nostalgic developer based on a decompilation of the original game by k4zmu2a on GitHub.

Judging by Sylvestre’s Reddit post history, the developer is also working on an iOS port. Sylvestre posted about their port on the Android subreddit too but the post has since been removed by mods. Far be it for me to judge what anyone has on their smartphone, especially when official social media apps are ever hungry for one’s data, but it never hurts to have context before you tap ‘install’.

Space Cadet Pinball made its debut as part of the Microsoft Plus! enhancement pack for Windows 95, but its inclusion began to be phased out around 2001. According to long-term Microsoft employee Raymond Chen, the version initially intended for the 64-bit edition of Windows XP ran into a game breaking collision bug, and so was removed. Chen offers a little more context about the various quirks of Windows development that lead to this bug in his follow-up blog post here.

Space Cadet Pinball did eventually return for the Windows XP Professional x64 Edition in 2005, with comparatively minor visual glitches. It’s been MIA from OS releases ever since, and obviously you won’t find it in Windows 11, or the soon to be no longer supported Windows 10. Chen sheds light on this too, explaining that attempts to revive the game as a Microsoft Garage project were scuppered due to the original licensing agreement.

Apparently, Space Cadet Pinball was agreed to only ever be released alongside successor Windows OS products after 95, or as part of an enhancement pack like the aforementioned Microsoft Plus. To get more specific, the original agreement prevents Microsoft from putting Space Cadet Pinball out as a standalone release, or from making the game’s source code publicly available—hence k4zmu2a’s decompilation and Kyle Sylvestre’s very much unofficial Android port.

There are ways to play it on PC today, however. Google the name and you’ll find a few. Players have been keen to get back to hitting space balls for an age—here’s a PC Gamer story on how to play the game from seven years ago. No idea if that one still works, mind.