It’s on the machine in Mike Hallman’s office.’ And like, ‘What?’” “So… it was one Sunday afternoon, and we get email from Bill saying, ‘Hey, I think I just got a new high score. “Because the high scores were text file, we had a rule that somebody had to put eyes on your score,” Fitzgerald said. Ryan said Gates’ Minesweeper addiction got so bad that he “took it off his machine.” But that wasn’t enough to stop the CEO from getting his fix.

The record for us right now I think is eight.’ (I think that was me, embarrassingly.) Apparently, the fact that the record was very close to where he was led him to make his mission. “I wrote back to him, I go, ‘Yeah, 10 seconds is really good. “Originally, I think I got a mail from Bill saying, ‘I just solved Minesweeper in 10 seconds. “He was like, ‘I tried it 20 times, it’s impossible.’” Ryan said he eventually had to go to Slade’s office and spend 10 minutes completing an Expert board before the marketer was convinced. “I was like, ‘It's not impossible,’” Ryan told me.

Entertainment Pack Product Manager Bruce Ryan recalled getting an email from marketing colleague Mike Slade, who insisted the game’s Expert level was impossible and should be pulled. This was apparently a relatively common problem. “Whenever someone claimed to have found a bug, I asked them to send me a screenshot and then I had to point out their logic mistake.” But those “testers” weren’t strictly needed to refine the product, as Donner recalled. “It was, needless to say, a very well-tested piece of software around Microsoft,” added Charles Fitzgerald, a product manager for the first Windows Entertainment Pack, where Minesweeper would make its public debut. At that time at Microsoft, people were staying late into the night, so you’d see people taking breaks, 9 o’clock at night, playing a round of Minesweeper.” “It was one of those things where you would walk down the hall and you’d see it… on people's computers.

“We never had to work very hard to find testers,” said Libby Duzan Nuttall, who served as Microsoft’s lead product manager for entertainment in the '90s. The early Windows version of Minesweeper became an instant hit on Microsoft's internal network when it released in 1990, according to people who worked there at the time.

Original minesweeper online