Shortly after Windows 3.0 shipped, we rounded up and shipped some of the games floating around inside Microsoft, most of which were byproducts of developers teaching themselves to program Windows. Minesweeper was one of the games in the first Entertainment Pack for Windows (tagline: “It’s not just the most fun you can have with Windows, it’s the only fun. Unless you count Microsoft Project…”).
Minesweeper was later included in Windows 3.1 and subsequent versions of the operating system, putting it a click away for hundreds of millions of people. That evidently was enough exposure to make Minesweeper a bit of a cultural icon. And now, after a decade or two rattling around in the recesses of that generation’s brains, it is having a bit of a moment. I am suddenly seeing Minesweeper references all over:
1.) Minesweeper inspires the recent XKCD comic Mine Captcha
2.) Minesweeper shows up in the new book Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir, the author of The Martian, as an exemplar component of any repository of all human knowledge and software (spoilers herein):
“I move to dismiss.”
“Your Honor!” Canton protested.
“On what grounds, Ms. Stratt?” said the justice.
“Because I don’t have time for this bullshit,” she said. “We are building a ship to literally save our species. And we have very little time to get it done. It will have three astronauts—just three—to do experiments we can’t even conceive of now. We need them to be prepared for any possible line of study they deem necessary. So we are giving them everything. The collected knowledge of humankind, along with all software. Some of it is stupid. They probably won’t need Minesweeper for Windows 3.1, and they probably don’t need an unabridged Sanskrit-to-English dictionary, but they’re going to have them.”
3.) Minesweeper gets both a mention and, more importantly, its own footnote in a recent analysis of the Duolingo S-1 in the financial newsletter The Diff.
“Since Duolingo is teaching language at scale, for example, it needs to rely heavily on multiple-choice questions: synonyms can make a given answer subjective, so the right approach to possible answers is to list very distinct words, but that means that a partial translation provides some clues to fill in the missing word; multiple-choice answers to sentence-long translation questions asymptotically approach Minesweeper, not translation.2”
2 Minesweeper does have some educational value; you can develop a good instinctive understanding of probability if you play it for a while. But the marginal value of the second through tenth hour of Minesweeper in this domain is a lot lower than the value of the first fifteen minutes of reading a probability textbook, or the first five of talking to someone who thinks in terms of odds and wants to explain their thought process.
I even recently talked to an author writing an entire book about Minesweeper (fret no more about the future economic viability of the publishing industry!). I recounted the marketing strategy (target audience: loosely supervised business people), explained why BillG was registering high scores from a machine in Mike Hallman’s office (Mike was president of Microsoft for roughly the same amount of time it took to finish a game of Minesweeper in Expert mode), and made fun of the Office people who thought publishing games “sent a poor message to our corporate customers”.
Between this post and a previous post on SkiFree, I am on track to finish my epic serialization chronicling the entire history of Microsoft’s early games business late this century.
UPDATE: also sweeping the world of fashion.
