Space Cadet (Pinball) has the most direct answer: it was written largely in x86 assembler and didn't survive a 64-bit translation attempt. Raymond Chen says the ball would ghost off the table, fall down and end the game in seconds when trying to run in 64-bit math. Raymond even takes personal responsibility for the failure to keep Space Cadet alive and disappointment it didn't survive past Windows XP:

https://web.archive.org/web/20160205141748/https://blogs.msd...

The larger answer to the rest of the games seems to be related: Windows trying to shrink its non-cross platform code "liabilities" and things it needed to translate between processor architectures. The games were never a priority for the Windows team. Most were either intern projects and/or contracted from "second party vendors". In Windows 8, Microsoft decided to completely contract all of the games to a second party, the strange and sometimes controversial Arkadium [1]. The Arkadium Solitaire and Minesweeper were installed by default for a while, but as Arkadium started injecting more ads and also quickly increasing the install sizes of the games, Microsoft did the natural thing and removed them as default installs so people would stop complaining about their size and/or ads and instead just adding shortcuts to install them from the Store.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arkadium

That would be doing something nice for the user at the expense of doing slightly less funneling traffic to their app store where they make their money on adtech and access fees.

We wouldn't want to leave any money on the table in the pursuit of a better product, would we?

Google play games comes with a offline copy of snake, solitaire, minesweeper, and a few others. I'm not sure if that's bundled with phones or not, and the games are kinda hidden. I only found out about them because they come up if you try to search Google play without a connection.

I remember kids begging their parents to play Brick Breaker on their parents blackberries. Of course this was before young children having iPads was normalized

Please describe the precise ROI with $1M in research and studies, that will show an OS vendor will make a profit on such bundles.

(I can't imagine any other reason why, except maybe bug reports)

Yes tilting an actual pinball machine is very legitimate. On the other end, pinball machines have adjustable legs and the arcade owner will make adjustments to the machine to throw people off. Not daily, but when they notice someone is constantly earning free plays, they will take action. Any minor changes will cause the ball to take slightly different paths.

It's been forever since I played space cadet, but skillful nudging is beneficial in many video pinballs. A little nudge here and there helps save balls from the drain and can help make some shots.

All good pinball players tilt. Owners can make the machine "loose" or "tight" (at least that what we used to call it.) A loose machine allows a lot of tilting, and a tight one only allows slight nudges.

If the ball is coming straight down the middle, there's no choice but to tilt. A really good player will be able to tilt the tightest machine enough to get that ball to a flipper. Also, a really good player is better at judging "straight down the middle" and choosing not to tilt at all. Anybody who is reasonable at pinball can play for an infinite amount of time on a very loose machine.

It's not actually a factor that can be removed from pinball. You can't have machines tilting when people just lean against them, or when a player pushes a flipper button energetically. The owner has to pick some threshold. They're irredeemably physical games.

Pinball Dreams first on a friend's Amiga and then my PC for me, later Pro Pinball. Space Cadet was hopeless garbage in comparison. Space Cadet had a boring table, much worse graphics and sound, and terrible ball physics.

I still applaud the Linux version for its hack value :)

I loved playing Epic Pinball and especially the music. Exactly the kind of sound I enjoy. I collected mod files on floppies as a kid.

Other pinball games are bland and boring to me.

Yeah the Pro Pinball series cstarted arriving around the same time as Windows 95. I guess people liked the Windows game because it was just a few clicks away.

Some of us only had pinball. My parents didn’t buy games, so I got what was included.

I was a fan of "3D Ultra Pinball". You have to keep smacking that glider!

Honestly my favorite pinball game of all time is not at all realistic: Devil Crush (I think it was called Devil Crash in the USA). It has been released on both the pcengine and the megadrive. For some reason I tend to prefer the pcengine more despite the graphics quality being a bit below, probably because of the more "dirty" sounding soundtrack. This is my main occupation when I am flying.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J-7iC8z6q8s&t=7

Define better.

It's really no surprise: it's a game that was pre-installed on hundreds of millions of computers. That's it. For people of a certain age it's very very likely they have played it, at least a bit.

It had a "plot". You "upgraded weapons"

...also it was what you played when you had no internet

It was actually part of Microsoft Plus! for Windows 95. It wasn't directly available for Windows 98 at all, but the Windows 98 install disc does include an INF file so you can install it, provided you have a copy of Plus! for Windows 95.

It was also included with Windows NT 4.0, Windows 2000, Windows Me, and Windows XP (both the original and x64 versions). Finally removed in Vista to never return.

Things included with Plus! packs were often rolled into subsequent versions of Windows, and Pinball is such an example.

It was, but in NT 4.0, 2000, Me and XP.

It was bundled with XP.