Before the advent of smartphones, or widespread internet connectivity, the primary role of a PC was for personal and professional productivity. In the Windows 3.1/95 era, my memories of the main “apps”1 installed on our home computer revolved around word processing via Microsoft Office, photo editing—really more like crude drawings—via Photoshop, and piles of CD-ROMs that combined into Encyclopedia Brittanica. That, and of course some of the generation’s best games: Simcity 2000, Warcraft II, Civilization II, etc.
On any given PC, though—say the machines at my summer job, or the school library—the availability of software was much more limited. Like most PC users back then, I found the Games folder in Windows and spent my fair share of hours on the classic Windows suite of preinstalled games: Solitaire, Minesweeper, Space Cadet Pinball. Boss Fight Books’ Minesweeper was thus a pleasant trip down memory lane, a short and sweet book that centers around the game that came with Windows 3.1 and gave millions of Windows users something to do when not cranking through spreadsheets, as well as what led up to that phenomenon and what has happened since.
On the before front, the book does a great job tracing through the lineage of games that led up to the creation of Minesweeper in the 80s. From interviews with the folks involved, the gameplay ideas around detecting mines on a grid, along with using spatial logic with clues on a board came about as early as the ZX Spectrum. Across multiple game developers and iterations of games that played with this mechanic, eventually came the version of Minesweeper that got bundled with the first Microsoft Entertainment Pack. That add-on’s sales success, along with the popularity of Minesweeper specifically in the package, promoted its inclusion into Windows as a default game, from Windows 3.1 through Vista.
Skipping ahead to the after, the book—and I wholeheartedly concur with the author’s sentiment here—ridicules the modern version of the game, rewritten with the release of Windows 8 and its Microsoft Store. Sure, there are updated graphics and even a new game mode that expands the base game, but the cost is pervasive ads and an optional subscription to remove said ads. This “new” game (which was still over a decade ago, when Minesweeper was published in 2023) managed to take the main factors that made the original so ubiquitous—that it was simple, free, and came pre-installed—and made the polar opposite decisions on each dimension. Perhaps Minesweeper doesn’t have quite the universal appeal and lasting power of, say, a Tetris, but the shameless monetization by Microsoft with their classic games didn’t help.
Speaking of Tetris, in Minesweeper’s heyday in the late 90s and early 2000s, there was a competitive scene that developed around the game, not dissimilar to Tetris albeit on a smaller scale. There’s something to be said about games that originated from that early era of gaming, where the lack of fancy graphics and production values meant that games had to stand out based on solid, addictive gameplay. The games that have stood the test of time tend to be simple to start, but harbor surprising depth that communities form around the game to explore those depths and compete for bragging rights.
In the case of Minesweeper, its competitive landscape centered around solving the game’s variously sized boards (Beginner, Intermediate, Expert) as fast as possible, accepting that each game’s random mine placements are an intrinsic variable in results. Like Tetris, the game also had its high-score controversies; in this case, the issue stemmed from the algorithm that places the mines pseudo-randomly, where top players eventually developed strategies tailored to reduce the randomness. The book didn’t get into the root cause, but I found the issue well-documented on the Minesweeper wiki: it looks like the random function used for those versions of Windows relied on a getTickCount() call that mapped deterministically to system time, and that bit of deterministic behavior allows Minesweeper to get into predictable cycles where the location of mines are preordained and thus with known solutions. Also like Tetris, the eventual solution for this unintended side effect in the code was to migrate to new apps, which both patched this issue as well as added other quality-of-life features like online leaderboards and inline video recording for high score runs.
Minesweeper was a quick, fun read down memory lane. Reading it reminded me of how different software was programmed and even sold 40 years ago; back then, the business models and physical limitations of packaged disks, as well as how programs were built during developers’ spare time and passed around like physical objects are unrecognizable today, probably for the better. As to the game itself—I found a serviceable version via Netflix Games, of all places. It’ll scratch the itch…and at least not demand its own subscription.
They were called “programs” back then.↩
