Boom! — How Bill Gates Minesweeper addiction helped lead to the Xbox Book excerpt: Convincing early ’90s Microsoft to sell games was an uphill battle.
Kyle Orland – Feb 23, 2023 12:00 pm UTC Enlarge / These little numbers helped launch a gaming revolution at corporate-focused Microsoft of the early ’90s.Microsoft / Reddit reader comments 0 with Share this story Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Share on Reddit Ars Technica Senior Gaming Editor Kyle Orland has written the definitive book on the history of Minesweeper. In this exclusive excerpt, he takes you back to the Microsoft of the early ’90s, where the game got its hooks into countless employees (including a certain CEO) and helped convince the company that Windows gaming might be a thing after all…
Enlarge / Kyle Orland’s Minesweeper is available for pre-purchase as part of the Boss Fight Books Season 6 Kickstarter.The early Windows version of Minesweeper became an instant hit on Microsoft’s internal network when it released in 1990, according to people who worked there at the time.
We never had to work very hard to find testers, said Libby Duzan Nuttall, who served as Microsofts lead product manager for entertainment in the ’90s. It was one of those things where you would walk down the hall and youd see it on people’s computers. At that time at Microsoft, people were staying late into the night, so youd see people taking breaks, 9 oclock at night, playing a round of Minesweeper.
It was, needless to say, a very well-tested piece of software around Microsoft, added Charles Fitzgerald, a product manager for the first Windows Entertainment Pack, where Minesweeper would make its public debut. But those testers werent strictly needed to refine the product, as [Minesweeper coder Robert] Donner recalled. Whenever someone claimed to have found a bug, I asked them to send me a screenshot and then I had to point out their logic mistake.
This was apparently a relatively common problem. Entertainment Pack Product Manager Bruce Ryan recalled getting an email from marketing colleague Mike Slade, who insisted the games Expert level was impossible and should be pulled. I was like, It’s not impossible, Ryan told me. He was like, I tried it 20 times, its impossible. Ryan said he eventually had to go to Slades office and spend 10 minutes completing an Expert board before the marketer was convinced. “Whenever someone claimed to have found a bug, I asked them to send me a screenshot and then I had to point out their logicmistake.”Minesweeper coder Robert Donner
Even in an office full of logic-minded computer engineers, though, Minesweeper didnt appeal to everybody at Microsoft. Of the many amateur Windows games circulating around the internal network at the time, Minesweeper was the most polarizing, Ryan said. Microsoft people are fairly analytical, so they like the analytical and logical aspect of Minesweeper. But there were a lot of people who would look at it and go, I dont get this. There would be a lot of people who would click randomly, hit a mine and [stop]. They thought it was a guessing game. Advertisement Hooking Bill
While Minesweeper love at Microsoft wasnt universal, the game managed to get its hooks into the most important backer a Microsoft game could have.
Bill got addicted, as Fitzgerald put it bluntly.
Thats Bill Gates, of course, the billionaire Microsoft founder and CEO (though he was not yet the richest man in the world in 1990). Despite having money to spend on much more elaborate entertainments, in 1990, Gates found himself obsessed with dominating [Minesweeper coder Curt] Johnson and Donners simple Windows gaming experiment. Enlarge / Former Microsoft CEO Bill Gates poses with a boxed copy of Windows 3.0, circa 1990.Microsoft
Originally, I think I got a mail from Bill saying, I just solved [Beginner] Minesweeper in 10 seconds. Is that good? Ryan recalled. I wrote back to him, I go, Yeah, 10 seconds is really good. The record for us right now I think is eight. (I think that was me, embarrassingly.) Apparently, the fact that the record was very close to where he was led him to make [it] his mission [to beat it].
Ryan said Gates Minesweeper addiction got so bad that he took it off his machine. But that wasnt enough to stop the CEO from getting his fix. Because the high scores were [an easy-to-edit] text file, we had a rule that somebody had to put eyes on your [record] score, Fitzgerald said. So it was one Sunday afternoon, and we get email from Bill saying, Hey, I think I just got a new high score. Its on the machine in [short-lived Microsoft President] Mike Hallmans office. And [we were] like, What?
Ryan recalled the surreal experience of being called in by Bill Gates on a random weekend only to cluster around another executives computer and confirm a new Minesweeper high score of five seconds on a Beginner board. This was early evening. So we went over there, seven at night. [Hallman] was a former Boeing executive, and he was not a humorful guy, so the idea that Bill is sitting there after work, going into the presidents office so he could play Minesweeper, it was just weird imagery.
That was when I realized how much valuable time a game could waste, Donner said of hearing about Gates multi-office record chase. Page: 1 2 3 4 5 Next → reader comments 0 with Share this story Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Share on Reddit Kyle Orland Kyle has been the Senior Gaming Editor at Ars Technica since 2012, specializing in video game hardware and software. He has journalism and computer science degrees from University of Maryland. He is based in the Washington, DC area. Email kyle.orland@arstechnica.com // Twitter @KyleOrl@mastodon.social Advertisement Channel Ars Technica ← Previous story Related Stories Today on Ars
