Microsoft Minesweeper – A legend of generation

“Where there’s Windows, there is Minesweeper.”

As it is one of the few pre-installed games that come along with the popularization of PC in early 2000, it may be the first game that the Y generation played during their childhood, including me. As one of the earliest games that Microsoft developed, Minesweeper witness the evolution of each generation of Microsoft’s operating system.

Minesweeper made its debut as apart of the 1990’s Microsoft Entertainment Pack 1, a paid add-on for Windows 3.0. and became an iconic part of the operating system since then. It was originally created by Curt Johnson for IBM’s OS/2, then ported to Microsoft Windows by Robert Donner, both Microsoft employees at the time.

Although the game is so simple and almost remains unchanged throughout the 30 years, the design strategy behind it was profound. In the early days of PC’s, controlling games was text-based, at the time a mouse was still a rare thing. The pre-installed game pack was intended as a way to “teach” people with basic mouse controls without even realizing it. The simplistic controls of Minesweeper, with a left-click for the mines and a right-click to put down a flag, let users develop speed and precision and make mouse using a natural habit. The same strategy has been applied to Solitaire, which converted people who were used to command lines into the “drag and drop” gesture.