![]() "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. "We all fell in love with it very quickly," Ryan says.Īn ad for the Windows Entertainment Pack. 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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