I actually still have that Mac, but I haven't turned it on in years. I think it was written in Basic and was very slow on an old Mac. "There was a Macintosh game that I had, with black and white images to display all of the cells. Sadly, he's not sure what the game was called that he did borrow from. Microsoft Paint, in those days, used black and white."Ĭurt comes from the generation where copying ideas was the norm, so is disarmingly honest about borrowing the idea for Minesweeper - but not from Mined-Out. "Minesweeper was my second program, because I had to write a 16 colour bitmap editor to develop the assets used in the program.
His duty was to maintain a debugger for OS2, but in his spare time he was teaching himself the newly-created art of GUIs. In Seattle it was a record low, of zero Fahrenheit." Considering his previous job was generating graphs to represent the gaps between the doorframes of Ford cars, he saw it as a step up. Johnson is a self-taught programmer who moved to Microsoft in the early 90s, mainly because the weather was better. I'm happy to wait, as it's taken me months to hunt him down. When he talks about Minesweeper, he's even slower. It's so soft and hesitant I keep thinking he's finished speaking mid-sentence, so I start talking before the transatlantic lag reveals he was just taking a long, long moment to sieve his thoughts. And the men who made that version of Minesweeper were Curt Johnson and Robert Donner.
#Minesweeper publishers windows 8#
It's been a staple ever since, and Windows 8 is the first Microsoft OS since 3.11 that hasn't included it by default. "I also thought Mined-Out was a much better game for the simple reason that you didn't need to take random chances in Mined-Out like you do have to with Minesweeper."Īfter making its debut in the Windows Entertainment Pack, Minesweeper was given away with Windows 3.11, the breakthrough version of Windows. "When I saw Minesweeper, I absolutely thought that it was based on my idea," says Andrew. Mined-Out was, of course, copied - and it's Microsoft's own take on Andrew's formula that's now the better known game.
#Minesweeper publishers code#
Unusually also at the time only machine code games were available, so a Basic game becoming commercial was unusual." With the generous royalties given by his publisher, Quicksilva, Andrew established his own publishing company, Incentive Software, to make his next game, Splat! "It's another original design that has never been copied, to my knowledge." I was 24 at the time and running a mail order business from my bedroom. "I do remember my very supportive mother testing it for me along the way. I was only a Basic programmer so puzzle/thought games were a natural fit as well." Mined-Out, which - perhaps unwittingly - laid the foundation for Minesweeper. So a block/grid game was a natural for this computer. "You could only have 2 different colours in each 'character square' which was 8 by 8 pixels big. "Mined-Out was developed partly due to the Sinclair Spectrum's limitations of colour blocks on the screen," Andrew recounts. Soon he moved on to the ZX81, and his very first commercial game, Mined-Out. Andrew has had a long career in games which began when, as a child, he'd modify his wooden pinball table with nails and elastic bands. That credit goes to a lesser known, tightly designed game by Ian Andrew.
Minesweeper wasn't the first of its kind. The mechanical logic would make a chess grandmaster grin, while bold gamblers still chase quicker and quicker clearance times. There's the smiley face when you do well, the gasp of failure and the cross-eyed look of death when you fare slightly worse. The levels vary from 8x8 grids up to huge 64圆4 grids. Everyone can recount the basics the left-mouse button reveals the contents of a tile whilst the right flags a tile as containing a mine. It's video game wallpaper that's silently seeped into countless people's lives.
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