Minesweeper got in because, at the time Windows 3.1 was released in 1992, it was the favorite game of everybody involved in creating that software, including overlord Gates. Not surprisingly, for years Solitaire was the most-used application for Windows, Microsoft officials say. It gave them something familiar and fun to do with their computer while it also taught them how to use a mouse. Microsoft originally put Solitaire into Windows to soothe people intimidated by the operating system, according to Duzan. In one year, more than 1 million copies have sold. Now Microsoft is aiming a new package of games at "loosely supervised executives" in their mid-thirties with college education who spend a minimum of four hours a week playing games. In Solitaire and Minesweeper, you hold down the "Alt" key and hit "Tab." In a game called Tetris, originally designed by Soviet software writers, pressing "escape" instantly displays a bogus spreadsheet resembling Lotus 1-2-3. Then, when the boss passes, the game returns, right where you left it. They are keystrokes that instantly cause the machine to switch out of fun-and-games display and into the appearance of work. In fact, "boss keys" are becoming ubiquitous on computer games. Every time she looks at the wall tiles, her eyes automatically group them into patterns of nine - the key to winning the game.ĭid Microsoft know the number of worker-hours American industry would lose to its nefarious device? Well, Duzan said, not for nothing can you disguise your game fetish by turning the Windows sound off. One woman claims that because of Minesweeper, she now has trouble going to the bathroom. People have been known to dream about it. Players are pitted against themselves, trying to beat their own best times. Minesweeper is more addictive than Solitaire. If your computer suddenly awards you a "bloom" of tiles cleared automatically, the odds are with you.) (Hint from the aficionados: Click on five or six tiles randomly right at the beginning. Figuring out how to get started on Minesweeper is not intuitively obvious. Minesweeper is harder than Solitaire, which is the old rainy day card game. The object of the game is to turn over all the tiles with no bombs, and none of the tiles that do hide bombs, using the clues provided. Minesweeper is a logic puzzle made up of square tiles, some of which have "bombs" underneath them. How can one retain human dignity when computers do the important stuff better than people?" When Gates found out how Reeves had cheated to achieve a three-second score, he fired off an e-mail message: "My critical skills are being displaced by a computer. To beat Gates's time, Tom Reeves, a development manager for Microsoft, wrote a small computer program (a macro) that attacked the puzzle automatically. (Ordinary mortals have been known to take five minutes to solve this puzzle.) That's where he set his personal record of five seconds. Instead, he went to the machine of Mike Hallman, then-president of Microsoft, when he felt compelled to play. Microsoft founder Bill Gates became so addicted to Minesweeper that he took it off his personal office machine, reports Libby Duzan, lead product manager for entertainment at the company. Large gray men in large gray suits - lugging laptops loaded with spreadsheets - are consumed by beating their Solitaire scores, flight attendants observe. "The water treatment plant in Warrenton, I installed their system, and the next time I saw the client, the first thing he said to me was, 'I've got 2,000 points in Solitaire.' "Īs a result, airplanes full of businessmen resemble not board meetings but video arcades. "Gomer" Pyles, president of Able Bodied Computers in The Plains, Va. "It's swallowed entire companies," says Dennis J. Now it's the other way around, so the boss can't see you playing Solitaire." "You used to see offices laid out with the back of the video monitor toward the wall. "Yup, sure," says Frank Burns, a principal in the area's largest regional computer bulletin board, the MetaNet. Pre-loaded inside Microsoft's Windows software that controls 80 percent of the world's new PCs are two insidious games - Solitaire and Minesweeper.ĭoes this mean that productivity software spreading through the nation's offices is instead sowing indolence, distraction and the collapse of American capitalism? As industry and government drop clunky old mainframes for networked personal computers, America is discovering the truly diabolical nature of Bill Gates's Microsoft empire. Luckily the customer, too, was a Minesweeper addict. "Holy !" shouted the president of Washington's Corporate & Government Consulting Inc. Dit Talley was on the phone with a customer the moment he cracked the Minesweeper computer game in a world-class eight seconds.
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