Last week, we wrote about
Microsoft Solitaire, a digital version of the card game that been included in almost every single Windows release since 3.0 in 1990. However, another causal game that Microsoft also launched in 1990, but not inside Windows itself, became nearly as popular.
Of course, we are talking about
Microsoft Minesweeper, which most people just refer to as
Minesweeper. The game is simple to play but, like most great and addictive video games, is hard to master. The premise is simple. You see a grid of squares. Some have mines. The object is to click on every square that doesn't have a mine. Some squares have numbers that show how many mines are adjacent to that square
.
While there were simple video games released before 1998 that were similar to
Minesweeper in terms of gameplay,
GameSetWatch says that it was the work of two men at Microsoft, Robert Donner and Curt Johnson, who came up with the game that so many of us know and love today. Johnson has said that he was inspired by another game when he and Donner came up with Minesweeper, but he claimed he has forgotten what that game actually was.
In any case, the simple design of
Minesweeper, combined with the use of logic and deduction to avoid hitting a mine, was the perfect time sink. In 1990, the game was included in a software game collection,
Microsoft Entertainment Pack 1 which also had a Microsoft Windows version of
Tetris. However, the game didn't become mega-popular for PC users until 1992, when Microsoft added
Minesweeper to every copy of Windows 3.1.
According to
Business Insider, Microsoft co-founder and then-CEO Bill Gates quickly became obsessed with
Minesweeper. Microsoft product manager Bruce Ryan stated that Gates had uninstalled the game from his own PC because it was taking up too much of his time to play.
Ryan stated that at one point his team created a macro for
Minesweeper that clicked on one corner of the game's grid and then reloaded the game. This macro kept this up until it found a way to solve the game with just one click.
Ryan reportedly then emailed Gates, stating "Sorry, you got eclipsed by a macro." Gates wrote back, stating, "When machines can do things faster than people, how can we retain our human dignity?". We do have to wonder, with the rise of AI, if he still feels this way,
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