#MINESWEEPER ULTIMATE MANUAL#
#MINESWEEPER ULTIMATE WINDOWS#

'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.

#MINESWEEPER ULTIMATE WINDOWS#

There was no budget to even do quality testing on the Windows Entertainment Pack. Ryan says the ideal demographic for Minesweeper and the games of the Windows Entertainment Pack were 'loosely supervised businesspeople.' Blowing upĪn ad for the Windows Entertainment Pack. The Windows Entertainment Pack marketing carried slogans like 'No more boring coffee breaks' and 'Only a few minutes between meetings? Get in a quick game of Klotski,' aimed at Microsoft's then-core audience of business users. So Ryan's team had two types of stickers made: One that said 'Now IncludesTetris for Windows!' and another that said 'Makes a great gift!' Fortunately, they didn't have to use the second one- except in France, where the overexcited local team used both. In the meanwhile, Tetris was supposed to be the headlining feature of the Windows Entertainment Pack.īut licensing negotiations with Spectrum HoloByte, who owned the American rights to the game, were coming down to the wire and there was no guarantee they'd be able to legally include it. The French version of the Microsoft Entertainment Pack, with both versions of the sticker. 'I'm the only product manager in Microsoft history, I think, to print his own product manual,' Ryan says.

#MINESWEEPER ULTIMATE MANUAL#

It fell to Ryan himself to write the manual for the indows Entertainment Pack, which ended up being two half-page Microsoft Word documents that he printed out and brought to the local copyshop so they could run off 20,000 photocopies. 'We all fell in love with it very quickly,' Ryan says. 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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Minesweeper ultimate