I'm not sure why I played so much Pinball on my Windows machine as a child. Nor am I sure why it was given so many different names, like Space Cadet 3D Pinball, 3D Pinball for Windows, Microsoft 3D Pinball, etc. What I do know, however, is it ran great on my old Windows NT 4.0 beige box, and now I've learned exactly why—the engineer who ported it over accidentally built a surprisingly resource-heavy game engine around it.
Enter Dave Plummer, an ex-Microsoft engineer whose other Windows contributions include Task Manager, native Zip file support, and Media Center, to name just a few (via The Register). Speaking on his YouTube channel, Dave's Attic, Plummer revealed that when he ported the game to Windows NT from Windows 95, he wrote a whole new game engine around the original logic in order to handle the video rendering and sound.
