InkBall

~ the obituary ~

microsoft put a game in the box that was designed for hardware almost nobody owned. inkball was written for windows xp tablet pc edition 2005 in august 2004, back when a tablet pc was a four-pound convertible laptop with a screen that swiveled and a price that made you think about it. the pen was the whole point. on xp the mouse cursor was not even drawn inside the game window, so without a digitizer you were guessing where your hand was.

the rules were easy to state and unreasonably hard to execute. balls of different colors entered the board and drifted, and there were holes in matching colors. you drew a short ink stroke in the path of a ball to bounce it where you wanted, the stroke vanished as soon as it did its job, and you drew another. gray balls were worth nothing, red two hundred, blue four hundred, green eight hundred, gold sixteen hundred, with whatever time was left added on at the end. five difficulty settings ran from beginner to expert, and later boards brought in walls that disappeared under you along with walls that changed a ball's color on contact.

then vista shipped in january 2007 and inkball went out to everybody. every edition except starter and home basic had it, mouse control was fixed so it actually worked without a pen, and it landed in the games folder next to solitaire and minesweeper on machines whose owners had no idea what a tablet pc was. that is the only reason anyone remembers it at all.

~ the case file ~

~ the funny part ~

inkball is probably the most-installed game almost nobody chose. it arrived on a huge number of home pcs because of a decision about which vista sku got which bundle, not because a single person went looking for it. the people who did open it found something genuinely difficult, a real-time geometry problem where your input erases itself, which is not what the games folder had trained anyone to expect from a free microsoft puzzle.

the interface idea underneath it was serious even if the game was not. microsoft was trying to prove that ink could be a control surface rather than a way of writing badly with a pen, and inkball is the demo: a stroke that acts on the world and then stops existing. that argument was lost in 2004 and won about six years later by capacitive touchscreens that had no pen at all.

~ the next chapter ~

windows 7 came out on october 22 2009 and inkball was not in it. tinker and hold 'em went at the same time, both of them vista ultimate extras, while the rest of the vista games folder survived the transition intact. microsoft never explained the choice. worse, the upgrade did not merely stop shipping the game, it removed the copy already on your disk, which produced years of forum threads from people asking where inkball went and being told to copy the executable off an old install before wiping it.

the whole windows games folder followed a few years afterward, cut from windows 8 and pushed into the store as ad-supported versions of the same things. inkball did not even get that. there was no store release and no revival of any kind. it exists now as a file people pass around, a game preserved by the same instinct that keeps abandonware sites running, which is a strange fate for something microsoft shipped to more machines than most studios will ever reach.

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