Sooner or later I'll split the game from data so the second part will be easier, allowing custom flatpaks to extend data. The flatpak has received updates especially for keeping an up-to-date runtime but the upstream game, however, has not and Flathub will only show appstream data for the update. You can see on the flatpak manifest repo that latest commit is 6 months old: https://github.com/flathub/com.github.k4zmu2a.spacecadetpinb...

I'm surprised there isn't a bigger community around high scores for this game given it's popularity. There's a video of a Chinese person getting 1.2 billion https://www.speedrun.com/3pwsc/forums/3qxfc but the only leaderboards I can find show 26 million as the best score.

edit found another leaderboard with 998 million as the high score, but photo proof for a game that comes with cheats seems wrong.

Cool! I checked out the GitHub:

https://github.com/k4zmu2a/SpaceCadetPinball

It's been ported to a whole bunch of consoles. There's also a browser version!

https://pinball.alula.me/

Also, turns out Space Cadet Pinball is part of a bigger Maxis game I never heard of: Full Tilt! Pinball.

Also turns out we almost got DOOM bundled with Window 95! (GLUEM) but it was rejected: "Can't we just get a game of pinball or something like that?" And here we are :)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Full_Tilt!_Pinball#Development

I wish somebody had as a passion project or company to build Space Cadet into a real physical pinball table.

I'm always surprised at the nostalgia for Space Cadet Pinball.

Perhaps it was just chance that I grew up playing what seemed like a much better pinball game ( Hyper-3D Pinball, aka Tilt!* ), but I was always underwhelmed by Space Cadet Pinball on windows.

In reality they're both pretty similar, I just happened to play a lot of one before the other, but the full screen DOS experience was much richer than what felt like a much more flat and less 3D windows experience.

You can see some Hyper-3D Pinball / Tilt! gameplay here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q9ufwSkB0XQ

* Not to be confused with "Full Tilt!", from which space cadet pinball comes from.

The Full Tilt version also has multiball which is missing from the Windows version. Lock a ball by shooting into a wormhole where the two lights are the same color, lock 3 balls to start.

If you enjoy playing Space Cadet I would really recommend giving Visual Pinball a try. There are so many more pinball games better than Space Cadet, with amazing tables people have made for them all available for free. I think it's Windows only though (very, tables are all scripted in VBScript and PinMAME is loaded as a COM object).

As an aside I tried to hack around with this and found out the programming for Space Cadet is pretty awful (not to disparage them or anything, it works). The state of the lights directly reflects the game state. (This is the cause of the bug where if you drain or start a mission while the rank-up light show is playing, you can skip a rank.)

Space Cadet wasn't bundled with Windows, was it? It was included in Microsoft Plus! 98 but not Windows 98.

I was wondering why newer OS doesn't bundle games with their default installation anymore? Even on smartphone. I remember on old dumb phone (nokia I think), you can play snake and some racing game. It even has multiplayer via bluetooth.

Is it legal?