Obsessed with records, Bill Gates played Minesweeper so much that the game took away from him

The arrival of Minesweeper on Windows in 1990 was a real revolution, including for the head of Microsoft who obsessed with it.

Long before the arrival of smartphones, the only game Windows owners had was Reversi, a board game (also called Othello) where the goal is to capture white or black pawns. But in 1990, the new version of the operating system brought its share of novelties within the Microsoft Entertainment Pack: new games like Tetris and especially Minesweeper.

This iconic strategy game will be a milestone for the American group. like says the journalist at the Arstechnica website Kyle Orland In a forthcoming book, Minesweeper’s first fan was President Bill Gates.

Register to win

If he wasn’t yet the richest man in the world, it wasn’t on one of the consoles right now (Super Nintendo was released in Japan in 1990) that he bided his time. In fact, Bill Gates has become obsessed with Minesweeper. “He got addicted,” says Charles Fitzgerald, product manager at the time.

Quickly, Bill Gates multiplies games in an attempt to break records. 10 seconds for beginner level? Almost a record, Fitzgerald replies who understands that his boss will do everything to defeat him.

The addiction is such that the engineers decided to remove Minesweeper from their computer. So the manager returned to his colleagues’ machines. Another product manager at the time, Bruce Ryan, recalls a call from Bill Gates on Saturday night who wanted to bring witnesses into the office to prove a new Minesweeper record.

Program to beat Bill Gates

So it was Melinda French, Director of Marketing, who later became Melinda Gates, who took matters into her own hands.

“Bill has a lot of important decisions, and he shouldn’t have made them [son] time !”

So the instruction is to leave the manager out of the progress of the demining file.

Bruce Ryan has an idea: get an unbeatable record set by Bill Gates who passes the rookie level in 5 seconds. Use for this a small program responsible for multiplying parts a million times to be exact.

Four hours later, the match was won in a second. “Sorry, your record of five seconds has been permanently surpassed because I don’t think you can beat a second,” he sent to the CEO.