The Microsoft minefield that Minesweeper survived

February 26, 2023 8:18 PM

Before Minesweeper became ubiquitous as one of the built-in games for several iterations of Windows, it had to survive a culture at Microsoft that was deeply anti-game, that looked down on the idea of computer games. An excerpt from a coming book from Boss Fight Books tells of how Microsoft got over themselves enough to produce the Microsoft Entertainment Pack, which ultimately led to Xbox, Halo, and more.

Ars Technica has another excerpt, which explains that Bill Gates' Minesweeper addiction helped make the case internally for the release of Entertainment Pack.

Disclaimer: I kind of know author Kyle Orland a little bit on Twitter and Mastodon, and helped him construct an ebook years ago.

posted by JHarris (15 comments total)

Is this going to be the second Boss Fight Book worth a damn? (The first is Spelunky by Derek Yu, which explains the way Spelunky was designed in a way by the designer himself that is fascinating and readable, but a lot of them are just "man, this game was good" in a way that doesn't have a lot of insight.)
posted by Merus at 9:55 PM on February 26, 2023 [2 favorites]

Is this going to be the second Boss Fight Book worth a damn? (The first is Spelunky by Derek Yu, which explains the way Spelunky was designed in a way by the designer himself that is fascinating and readable, but a lot of them are just "man, this game was good" in a way that doesn't have a lot of insight.)

I think that's the only one I've read but it is so good.
posted by grobstein at 11:44 PM on February 26, 2023

Is this going to be the second Boss Fight Book worth a damn?

Read the links, decide for yourself? I think it's a matter of taste, but then, I came to praise the book, not to bury it?
posted by JHarris at 12:19 AM on February 27, 2023 [3 favorites]

I'm with Bill on this one. I did spend a lot of time on Minesweeper.
When I was working for IBM, I was doing it at any down time I had.
I liked to aim for a daily high score total (combined score of the 3 sizes) of under 200, which I usually made. (Given enough down time)

At my next job, I removed it from easy access, as I could see it would become a problem.
posted by MtDewd at 5:51 AM on February 27, 2023 [1 favorite]

Is this going to be the second Boss Fight Book worth a damn?

Read the excerpts.

Been reading Orland's work for a long time and unlike many game writers, he's an actual journalist who has been known to dive deep into a subject he finds worthwhile (disclaimer: I've also interacted with him a bit on Twitter). I haven't picked up a Boss Fight Book in awhile-- the only ones I own are Spelunky and Final Fantasy V by Chris Kohler, another long-time game journalist who cares about history (granted, I haven't read that one yet...)-- so it looks like Minesweeper will be my third. Also, I hope Frank Cifaldi gets his turn sometime.
posted by May Kasahara at 6:43 AM on February 27, 2023 [1 favorite]

Man, it's like Microsoft didn't even exist before the IBM PC.

I mean, someone greenlighted Olympic Decathalon, right? Was it billg?
posted by JoeZydeco at 6:45 AM on February 27, 2023 [3 favorites]

Rich Macintosh, who ran sales for Microsoft at the time

Reverse nominative determinism.
posted by zamboni at 7:11 AM on February 27, 2023 [12 favorites]

I've got something from Boss Fight Books, Bible Adventures, and I'm pretty sure it's not just a hagiography.
posted by sagc at 7:36 AM on February 27, 2023 [1 favorite]

I really enjoyed Minesweeper. Then I found the .txt file where they kept the scores.
posted by aniola at 8:15 AM on February 27, 2023 [1 favorite]

The tale of Tetris’s byzantine licensing journey in the late 80s and early 90s could fill—and has filled—entire books

And soon a movie, which if the trailer is any indication will be wild.
posted by sjswitzer at 8:47 AM on February 27, 2023 [1 favorite]

I had entirely forgotten about Olympic Decathlon, but once the games in the video started I knew it intimately. Wow, what a weird random blast from the past!
posted by hippybear at 9:33 AM on February 27, 2023 [2 favorites]

Another big Minesweeper fan here. For those of you using Microsoft Teams, be aware that Microsoft is piloting games for work that let you play competitive games against coworkers in Teams. It includes Solitaire and Minesweeper amongst other things. It is fun.
posted by mmascolino at 12:16 PM on February 27, 2023

Microsoft published several games before Minesweeper (notably Adventure and Flight Simulator), which I'd hope is addressed in this book. Perhaps the big difference is that most of those were developed by outsiders and MS was just the publisher.
posted by Aleyn at 2:17 PM on February 27, 2023 [2 favorites]

Read the links, decide for yourself?

I appreciate it's not the norm for the first comment to have actually read the original article, but I did mean this as "this is fascinating, I'd be interested in reading the full book, and that's sort of unusual for Boss Fight Books".
posted by Merus at 3:14 PM on February 27, 2023 [1 favorite]

→ someone greenlighted Olympic Decathalon

That Apple II version looks way more flash than the TRS-80 version I remember. It credited Bill G as one of the development team. Two things I remember about it:

• the shot-putt being a huge mishapen head where you could drive a stick-like arm up or left
• being able to cheat on the two player games by throwing in spurious keystrokes on to your opponent via the TRS-80's iffy keyboard matrix decoding.

Good times.
posted by scruss at 4:19 PM on February 27, 2023