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Journalist Kyle Orland writes the entire book on the history of Sapper (opens in a new tab), which I suspect is a much more fascinating topic than it might seem at first glance. Minesweeper is one of those games that now seem ubiquitous, always available, no matter what computer you use, although its roots go back to Microsoft in the early 90s, specifically the Windows 3.0 era. As part of a book promotion campaign Ars Technica has a chapter on those early days (opens in a new tab)and one particularly big fan of the game.
Minesweeper first appeared on Microsoft’s internal network in 1990, where various employees quickly (understandably) became addicted. “Needless to say, this was very well-tested Microsoft software,” said Charles Fitzgerald, product manager for the first Windows Entertainment Pack that included Minesweeper.
Many Microsoft employees picked up the Minesweeper habit during this period and, amusingly, their reports to developers were often wrong. One claimed that the game could not be completed on Expert difficulty. “Every time someone claimed to have found a bug, I asked them to send me a screenshot, and then I had to point out their logical error,” recalls Minesweeper developer Robert Donner.
Then Minesweeper ensnared Microsoft’s biggest fish. “Bill (Gates) got hooked,” said Fitzgerald.
“Originally, I think I got an email from Bill saying, ‘I just solved a (beginner) minesweeper in 10 seconds. Is it good? said product manager Bruce Ryan. “I texted him back, I say, ‘Yeah, 10 seconds is really good. I think the record for us right now is eight.” (I think it was me, embarrassingly.) Apparently the fact that the record was very close to where it took him made (it) his mission (to beat it).
Gates was so obsessed with the game that he deleted it from his machine. In 1990, there was also an honesty system around high score records, which were in a simple text file, where each new record had to be seen by someone else. “So it was one Sunday afternoon and we got an email from Bill saying, ‘Hey, I think I just got a new record. It’s on a computer in the office of (then-Microsoft CEO) Mike Hallman.” And like, “What?”
“It was early evening,” Ryan said. “So we went there at seven in the evening. (Hallman) was a former Boeing executive and he wasn’t a funny guy, so … the idea of Bill sitting there after work, going to the president’s office to play Minesweeper, it was just weird images.”
Gates’ love for Minesweeper has been known since the early 90s, but so what Orlando’s book discovers (opens in a new tab) are the quasi-obsessive depths he reached, and at a time when Bill Gates was the most important figure in a company that was becoming one of the largest 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 became Melinda Gates in 1994. She asked Ryan to do “a favor for the company … Please don’t share the Minesweeper’s record progress with Bill.” Gates played too much and it “wasn’t good. Bill has a lot of important decisions to make, and it shouldn’t take time!”
The code of this story is rather amazing. Ryan decided that instead of keeping Gates from scoring high, he would find a way to go undefeated. Decades before Ryan became the right-hand man of most MMO players, Ryan used Windows Macro Recorder to automatically click one corner of a new Minesweeper game and then start a new one. The idea was that in one random layout where all the mines were in the lower right corner, this macro would “clear the entire screen in one or zero seconds. You’d just have to play a billion times to do that.”
“So I set him up there and then went out for a day of meetings,” Ryan said, “and four hours later he won (in a second) while I was out. I felt very efficient doing it when I wasn’t even in the office.”
Ryan sent a screenshot of the new record to Gates, writing: “Sorry, your five-second record has been permanently eclipsed as I don’t think you can beat one second.” Note that Minesweeper’s timer starts at one, not zero.
Gates’ response was titled “Chairman Displaced” and he explained to the staff he looped that Ryan’s macro irrevocably broke his minesweeper record.
“My critical skills are being superseded by the computer,” Gates wrote, as Ryan recalled. “This technology goes too far. When machines can do things faster than humans, how can we preserve our human dignity?”
Gates joked that maybe he should try it on medium difficulty.
The content of the email “sounded very poetic,” Ryan said. “This is a time when most emails were misspelled and cursory. (Gates) actually spent time thinking about it. It was like he was writing his tombstone or something.”
