Reporter Kyle Orland writes an entire book on the history of Minesweeper (opens in new tab), which I suspect is a much more fascinating topic than it first appears. Minesweeper is one of those games that feels somewhat ubiquitous, always there on whatever computer you’re on, even though it has its roots in Microsoft’s early 90s, specifically the Windows 3.0 era. As part of the book release campaign Ars Technica includes a chapter on those early days (opens in new tab)and a particularly big fan of the game.
Minesweeper first appeared on Microsoft’s internal network in 1990, where various employees were quickly infected (understandably). “It was, needless to say, a very well-tested piece of software around Microsoft,” said Charles Fitzgerald, product manager for the first Windows Entertainment Pack that would contain Minesweeper.
Many Microsoft employees developed a minefield habit during this period, and curiously, their reports to developers were often incorrect. One claimed 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 logical fallacy,” recalls Minesweeper coder Robert Donner.
Then Minesweeper snagged the biggest fish at Microsoft. “Bill [Gates] he got addicted,” Fitzgerald said.
“Initially, I think I got an email from Bill saying, ‘I just solved it. [Beginner] Minesweeper in 10 seconds. It’s good;” said product manager Bruce Ryan. “I wrote him back, I’m like, ‘Yeah, 10 seconds is pretty good. The record for us at the moment I think is eight.’ (I think it was me, unpleasantly.) Apparently, the fact that the record was so close to the point that led him to [it] his mission [to beat it].”
Gates would become so obsessed with the game that he removed it from his own machine. This year 1990 there was also an honesty system around the high score records which were in a simple text file where each new record score had to be seen by someone else. “Well it was a Sunday afternoon and we made it [an] email from Bill saying, “Hi, I think I just got a new high score. It’s in the machine inside [then-Microsoft President] Mike Hallman’s office.” And like, ‘What?'”
“It was early in the evening,” Ryan said. “So we went there, seven in the evening. [Hallman] he was a former Boeing executive and he wasn’t a humorous guy, so … the idea of Bill sitting there after work, going to the president’s office to play Minesweeper, it was just weird imagery.”
Gates’ love of Minesweeper has been known since the early 90s, but so what Orland’s book reveals (opens in new tab) it’s the near-obsessive depths he’s reached at a time when Bill Gates was the most important figure in one of the biggest companies in the world. This was a guy who had no time to waste.
“Melinda [French] he was a level above me, but we [were] in the same group,” Ryan said. French would become Melinda Gates in 1994. He asked Ryan to do “a favor for the company … Please don’t share with Bill any advances on the Minesweeper record.” Gates played too much, too it wasn’t a good thing. Bill has a lot of important decisions to make and that shouldn’t take time!”
The coda to this story is rather amazing. Ryan decided that instead of keeping the high scores from Gates, he would find a way to achieve an unbeatable score. Decades before they became the right hand of most MMO players, Ryan used the Windows Macro Recorder software to automatically click a corner of a new Minesweeper game and then start a new one. The idea was that in a certain random arrangement where all the mines were in the bottom right corner, this macro would “clear the entire screen in one or zero seconds. You’d just have to play like a billion times to do that.”
“So I put it in there and then I went for a day of meetings,” Ryan said, “and four hours later he had won [in a second] while I was away. I felt very effective having done that while I wasn’t even in the office.”
Ryan sent a screenshot of the new record to Gates, writing “Sorry, the five second record has been eclipsed for good because I don’t think you can beat a single second.” Note that Minesweeper’s timer starts at one, not zero.
Gates’ reply had the subject line “President Displaced” and explained to the staff that he had found that Ryan’s macro had irrevocably surpassed his Minesweeper record.
“My critical skills are being displaced by a computer,” Gates wrote, Ryan recalled. “This technology thing is going too far. When machines can do things faster than humans, how can we maintain our human dignity?”
Gates would go on to joke that maybe he should try medium difficulty.
The sentiment of the email “sounded very poetic,” Ryan said. “This is a time when most emails were misspelled and sketchy. [Gates] really took the time to think about it. It was like he was writing his tombstone or something.”