By 1992, the series had reportedly sold an impressive 500,000 copies.
#Minesweeper publishers windows#
There were three more Windows Entertainment Packs released, which included future classic games like Chip's Challenge, JezzBall, and SkiFree. Minesweeper was so well-loved, in fact, that the Windows team took over development of Minesweeper (Ryan jokes it was "stolen" from his team) and built it right into the operating system for 1992's Windows 3.1, where it sat alongside Solitaire. The Windows Entertainment Pack was a hit, with Minesweeper the runaway success of the bunch. Ryan says that the e-mail was lost ages ago, but that he's never forgotten what it said. Gates sent back that e-mail about retaining human dignity, with the addendum that he should maybe consider moving up to the "intermediate" difficulty level. "We sent an e-mail to Bill, saying 'Sorry, you got eclipsed by a macro,'" Ryan says. To show Gates who was boss, proverbially speaking, Ryan's team wrote a simple script (a "macro") that would automatically click on one corner of the Minesweeper board repeatedly and then reload the game, until it found a configuration that could be solved in one click- giving a time of one single second. "The thought of Bill Gates playing Minesweeper after hours on someone else's computer is quite funny," Ryan says. So Gates invited Ryan up to view his score on the computer in then-Microsoft President Michael Hallman's office, where he had been sneaking off to play. The funny part: Gates had actually uninstalled Minesweeper from his personal computer, because he was sinking too many hours into it, Ryan says.
The only one to answer was Bill Gates, who managed to clear it in 5 seconds. Ryan set a speed record of 6 seconds in the game's beginner mode, and sent out a company-wide e-mail challenge to beat his score. But it became a common joke in the office that Minesweeper was the most-tested product in Microsoft history, Ryan says, because the whole company was addicted. There was no budget to even do quality testing on the Windows Entertainment Pack. Ryan says the ideal demographic for Minesweeper and the games of the Windows Entertainment Pack were "loosely supervised businesspeople." Blowing upĪn ad for the Windows Entertainment Pack.
The Windows Entertainment Pack marketing carried slogans like "No more boring coffee breaks" and "Only a few minutes between meetings? Get in a quick game of Klotski," aimed at Microsoft's then-core audience of business users. So Ryan's team had two types of stickers made: One that said "Now IncludesTetris for Windows!" and another that said "Makes a great gift!" Fortunately, they didn't have to use the second one- except in France, where the overexcited local team used both. In the meanwhile, Tetris was supposed to be the headlining feature of the Windows Entertainment Pack.īut licensing negotiations with Spectrum HoloByte, who owned the American rights to the game, were coming down to the wire and there was no guarantee they'd be able to legally include it. The French version of the Microsoft Entertainment Pack, with both versions of the sticker. "We all fell in love with it very quickly," Ryan says. The Entry Businessteam knew pretty early on that Minesweeper was something special. So Ryan got together a bunch of games that members of the Windows team had been working on in their spare time, including IdleWild (the first-ever screensaver for Windows), a bunch of variations on Solitaire (which was included with Windows 3.0 itself), a licensed version of Tetris that Microsoft programmed in-house, and Minesweeper, a side project of developers Curt Johnson and Robert Donner. "None of the game companies had any interest in it," Ryan says. There was almost no budget for the Entertainment Pack project, and none of the major video game publishers thought that Windows would ever be a real platform for them. The Windows Entertainment Pack came about because Microsoft's "Entry Business" team, tasked with making Windows more appealing to homes and small businesses, was concerned that the operating system's high hardware requirements meant that people would only see it as a tool for large enterprises, says Ryan.
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