Journalist Kyle Orland is writing an entire book on the history of Minesweeper (opens in new tab), which I suspect is a much more fascinating topic than it might first appear. Minesweeper is one of those games that seems ubiquitous now, always present no matter what PC you’re on, even though its roots go back to Microsoft’s early 90s and specifically the Windows 3.0 era. As part of the book launch campaign Ars Technica features a chapter on those early days (opens in new tab)and a huge fan of the game.
Minesweeper first appeared on Microsoft’s internal network in 1990, where several employees quickly became (understandably) hooked. “Needless to say, it was very well tested software at Microsoft,” said Charles Fitzgerald, product manager for the first Windows Entertainment Pack to contain Minesweeper.
Many Microsoft employees picked up the Minesweeper habit during this time, and interestingly, their reports to developers were often erroneous. One stated that it was impossible to finish on Expert difficulty. “Whenever someone claimed to have found a bug, I’d ask them to send me a screenshot, and then I’d have to point out their logic error,” recalled Minesweeper coder Robert Donner.
So Minesweeper caught Microsoft’s biggest fish. “Bill (Gates) got hooked,” Fitzgerald said.
“Originally, I think I got an email from Bill saying, ‘I just solved Minesweeper (Beginner) in 10 seconds. Is that any good?'” said product manager Bruce Ryan. “I wrote back to him, ‘Yes, 10 seconds is really good. The record for us right now I think is eight.’ (I think it was me, embarrassingly.) Apparently, the fact that the record was so close to where he was drove him to do his mission (to beat).
Gates was so obsessed with the game that he removed it from his own machine. Being 1990, there was also an honesty system around the top score records, which were in a plain text file whereby any new record scores should have been seen by someone else. “It was a Sunday afternoon and we got (an) email from Bill saying, ‘Hey, I think I just got a new high score. It’s on the machine in (then Microsoft president) Mike Hallman’s office. And like, ‘What?'”
“That was earlier in the evening,” Ryan said. “So we went there, seven at night. (Hallman) was a former Boeing executive and not a good-natured guy, so… the idea that Bill is sitting there after work, going to the president’s office to playing Minesweeper, they were just weird pictures.”
Gates’ love of Minesweeper has been known since the early 1990s, but what Orland’s book reveals (opens in new tab) it’s the almost obsessive depth it reached, and at a time when Bill Gates was the most important figure in what was becoming one of the biggest companies in the world. This was a guy who had no time to waste.
“Melinda (French) was a level above me, but we were in the same group,” said Ryan. French would become Melinda Gates in 1994. She urged Ryan to do “the company a favor… Please don’t share the advances on the Minesweeper registry with Bill.” Gates was playing too much and that “wasn’t a good thing. Bill has a lot of important decisions to make and this shouldn’t be taking up time!”
The coda of this story is quite surprising. Ryan decided that instead of maintaining Gates’ high scores, he would figure out a way to establish an unbeatable score. Decades before they became the right hand of most MMO players, Ryan used Windows Macro Recorder software to automatically click on a corner of a new Minesweeper game and start a new one. The idea was that on a specific random layout, where all mines were in the lower right corner, this macro “would clear the entire screen in one or zero seconds. You’d only have to play a zillion times to do that.”
“So I put it in there and went out for a day of meetings,” Ryan said, “and four hours later it beat (by one second) while I was gone. I felt really efficient having done that while I wasn’t actually in the office .”
Ryan sent a screenshot of the new record to Gates, writing “Sorry your five second record has been permanently eclipsed because I don’t think you can beat a second.” Keep in mind that Minesweeper’s timer starts at one, not zero.
Gates’ response was subject to “Mistaken President” and explained to the team that he had reported that Ryan’s macro had irrevocably beaten his Minesweeper record.
“My critical skills are being replaced by a computer,” Gates wrote, as recalled by Ryan. “This technology thing is going too far. When machines can do things faster than people, how can we maintain our human dignity?”
Gates would go on to joke that maybe he should try the intermediate difficulty.
The sentiment in the email “sounded very poetic,” Ryan said. “This is an era where most emails were misspelled and incomplete. (Gates) really spent time thinking about it. It was like he was writing his tombstone or something.”