Bill Gates was obsessed with Minesweeper, which is why he later helped promote Xbox

I don’t have any proof of that, but I’d say it’s connected to Solitaire Hledn min (originally Minesweeper) one of the most played pota games ever. Its primitive rules, inappropriately generated puzzles and easy availability of it made it a distraction for office rats, easy for procrastinators from the time before social media.

The foundations of the game were laid in 1983 by a certain Ian Anderson, but it was popularized by Microsoft programmers Robert Donner and Curt Johnson. Those brands provided an automatically installed add-on for Windows, where it gained mass popularity. And so great that in 2001 a movement was created that called for its destruction, because it is insensitive to the victims of explosive devices due to its darkness. In Italy, therefore, the game is known as Flower Field, instead of mines, I must not grab flowers.

Kadopdn from Hlední min became such a phenomenon that the American newspaper Kyle Orland decided to write a whole book about it, its first chapter published on the Ars Technica server. He managed to interview a Microsoft employee at the time, thus providing a unique insight into the corporate culture of the software giant.

Charles Fitzgerald, who at the end of the 1990s was responsible for removing the functions of the emerging Windows 3 operating system (which users have known since version 3.11), believes that perhaps no other application has been tested as thoroughly as the first Minesweeper (by the way, here you can cover it right away).

In terms of time, Solitaire is one of the most used applications from Microsoft.

People tried to finish the game as hard as possible, and when they couldn’t, they claimed that it was his fault. Whenever someone claimed to have found a bug, I made them send me a screenshot, and then I had to show them where they made the logical mistake, programmer Donner still remembers today.

Even co-founder Bill Gates, who stopped by the team, did not escape the attention surrounding the game. I once received an e-mail from Bill that he completed a game of the smallest size (which means at least the size of the playing surface, otherwise the rules are the same note editor) in 10 seconds, and if that’s a good thing, Bruce Ryan, the product manager at the time, recalled. When he replied that it was very good, because the best anyone had done up to that time was eight seconds, it stimulated Bill’s compassion. It soon got out of control, and then Gates’ future wife, Melinda, begged the guys not to share the results with him because it would distract him from his job. Even Gates himself was aware of this, so he preferred to remove the Minefinder from his hat. Since the bag remained at work until night, the two of them slept on the switched off machine.

Bill Gates drinks water that five minutes ago was human excrement.

One Sunday afternoon we got an e-mail from Bill that said: Hey, I think I hit a new record first. He is secretly in the office of Mike Hallman (the then president of Microsoft, editor’s note), Ryan remembered and continued: When we were there, it was seven in the evening. Hallman was a former Boeing manager and not exactly a man with a good sense of humor, so the idea of ​​Bill sitting there after work and then going to the president’s office to play Minesweeper was just plain weird.

With Gates’ obsession (he finally managed to download the record and for 5 seconds) they finally managed to deal with it the way many real IT nerds do. Ryan then created a macro that immediately after starting the game activated the box on the top left and then immediately restarted the game.

As you can see, it is difficult to select interesting images for the Minefinder link.

Two or later she had to take a combination when all the mines are in the lower right corner and when the goal is completed it will cost only that one click. In the end, it didn’t even take that long for the first interplay of circumstances. When Gates saw how easily a colleague had reached him, which I had been trying to do for hours, he wrote an e-mail to all his colleagues saying: Technology has come a long way. If machines can chisel things faster than people, how can we preserve human dignity? And in order not to make it look even more pathetic, the driver joked that they would compete with you only on average.

Every day, even this short episode proved that Gates had contempt for games, so he was finally able to convince Microsoft to start a fight with Japanese game systems. Today, his Xbox is no longer a worthy competitor to Sony and Nintendo.

By the way, the fact that the heads of Microsoft have a great relationship with games is still evident today from Xbox’s Phil Spencer, who recently boasted on his Twitter profile that he had won every achievement in he Vampire Survivors.