davidst

A bit of amusing trivia: When Turbo Basic was returned to Bob Zale, he had to choose a new name for the product and made a list of likely candidates to choose from. One of the leading names was rejected once it occurred to Bob how it might be interpreted. It was "Master Basic".

Just curious: Are you thinking of the Turbo Help (THELP) TSR or the help built-in to the IDE?

Never say never but I think it's unlikely. Our motivation was to restore pinball to Windows (with modern updates) so every Windows user could enjoy it. Any other form of distribution wouldn't have the same coverage or impact. It would have been great to not only please the fans of the old game but to introduce a new generation to pinball just as Space Cadet once did.

> I'd be bold to ask why would you even need their blessing to release an updated or new version

My Cinematronics co-founders and I do not own the rights to any of the games we created. Cinematronics was acquired by Maxis, and Maxis was later acquired by Electronic Arts (who are being acquired, as well.) The rights would have to be untangled which was, I suspect, part of the hesitation Microsoft had in moving forward.

> Would you ever consider going back to the drawing board in an attempt to produce an official follow-up to Space Cadet Pinball?

We reached out to Microsoft a few years ago and offered to create a new version at no charge if they would restore it to Windows but they turned us down. There appeared to be no interest on their part.

I looked at it today and it is more fleshed out but still incorrect. For example:

> In 1994, the company began development of a port of Doom.

No, we were never porting Doom and we used none of Doom's code or resources. And I didn't propose to tone down the violence. The game was intended to be a fun first-person shooter in the same spirit as Doom but that was the only connection.

Microsoft was involved in a high-profile antitrust suit with the Department of Justice at the time. They were understandably sensitive about the potential PR impact of this type of game shipping with Windows and proposed gameplay design changes to reduce the violence.

I was CEO of Cinematronics (to be clear, we were a tiny startup so a CEO title didn't mean much - everyone pitched in wherever they could help.)

I negotiated the contract with Microsoft. My engineering contribution was not in the gameplay itself but in the game's memory manager and low-level rendering code. That was all performance-critical X86 assembly. I doubt any of that code lives on today.

Yes, there were a lot of anecdotes and the story on Wikipedia is both incomplete and incorrect in some ways. One day, I'll get around to editing it.

My memory is of promising it would be ready in time for Windows 95's launch, working excessively long hours, and focussing hard to make it fast enough so it would be fun to play on the minimum hardware requirement for Microsoft Plus.

I am one of the original authors of Space Cadet Pinball and I just want to say it is absolutely wonderful there are people who love our old pinball game enough to keep it alive. You made my day.

I am forwarding this post to my Cinematronics co-founders and friends, Mike Sandige (lead engineer) and Kevin Gliner (designer and product manager). They will enjoy seeing this as much as I did.