This book was leant to me by a friend. It looked totally brand new and pristine when I brought it home and now looks like it’s been read. I have envy for those who can read while keeping their book neat. And I have apologies to the friend who leant it to me. Not for the content, but for the looks. Never judge a book by its cover, especially if it’s been read.
This is a nice, little non-fiction title. It’s a small format with less than two hundred pages and I was leant it this time last week. I found it a bit compelling, there were a couple of nights I read too much, on the other hand, Minesweeper is more than compelling. A compelling book to match the game.
This book is about Minesweeper, the game. I’m sure you’ve heard of it, for many years it came pre-installed along with your Windows package on your computer. It looked to be a fairly easy game, but I struggled. Why? Because it’s a game of logic and that’s something I have little skills in. I did manage to win some games, but that’s the law of averages. The more you play the more chances you have of winning.
Because it was something I’d played a lot, I felt I had the qualifications needed to read this book. Minesweeper was first released in 1990 as part of the brand new Windows Entertainment Pack. In that year only eighteen other games were released for Windows, with 638 games released for MS-DOS. If you compare that to 2019 when more than 8,000 PC games were released on Valve’s Steam gaming service you’ll have some idea of how few games were around in those days
It was a great time-waster. Not just for me, but many people became addicted. This included Bill Gates, yes, that Bill Gates. They went so far as to delete the game from his computer so he found a senior executive’s computer and was playing on that. I’m not the only addict to Minesweeper.
But Minesweeper was not the first iteration of the game. There were a number of iterations with the first being Mined-Out made on the Sinclair ZX-81 using BASIC written by Ian Andrew. He did what a lot of young people did in those days. Buy a cheap computer and learn to program it, then write a game. I would have loved to be in that cohort as Dad had bought the Sinclair ZX-80 the previous year. Sadly, I wasn’t able to master any sort of programming. After maternal testing (Andrew’s mother was the beta tester), he polished a little and then sold it to the publisher, Quicksilva.
Mined-Out was copied, left, right and particularly centre. And that’s what happened in those days, you had clones of games every-which-away. In 1986 when I first started using a computer I was playing Mud Pies or Major Motion. I got quite good at both of those, but they were on the Atari 520ST and I believe were clones of other games. But the operating systems on each different type of computer were rather different. You couldn’t easily swap programs or games from one computer to the other in those days. This is all changed with Apple or Windows, apart from Linux these two are the standard, but back in the 1980s there was no standard operating system.
One thing that kept me reading was the community. There was an community dedicated to notating the high scores. Not just a website, but also a Usenet forum where people discussed how they were going with the game.
There were three levels to Minesweeper: Basic, Intermediate and, Advanced. There was much discussion as to the fastest time on the Intermediate. People discussed the layout of the boards and talked a lot of what the dream board might look like. Until one day that Intermediate dream board came up, multiple times, and the fastest time went down rapidly. In the forum they decided a Congress should discuss this and decide if anything should be done. There was a worry that people were gaming the system. I managed to game the system for the Advanced, but I suspect others found that loophole also. Advanced was a much larger grid than the others and you were able to choose the number of mines that were set down. I chose the smallest number of mines (ten) and that meant I could clear the board in two or three moves with random clicks.
I’m in awe that there was a community for people just to discuss Minesweeper. Community is what I live for. I’m in so many forums that discuss my various interests. I’m even in a badge forum on Facebook, I’ve managed to sell the bulk of my badge collection through that forum. I’ve not left the forum as I’m loving looking at other people’s collections. But going back to the Minesweeper community. I found it very emotional to read about how other people were so involved in the Minesweeper community.
Did I enjoy this book? That’s a very emphatic nod to the affirmative. This is everything I want in a history of computing book. It drops names and dates so I can consider my personal timeline and figure out what I was doing back then. It talked about the community, something I love so much. And it was well put together.
What didn’t I like? The typos. I found at least one instance where they had a single open quote immediately followed by a single closed quote, then a space and the word, with double closed quotes at the end of the sentence. That interrupted my reading far more than it should have. I also found an instance of the digit 1 instead of the capital I. And also the lack of a space between words.
Why am I making so much of a fuss about these things? That is for a different article. I do feel I’m screaming into the void, though. Many people would look at those issues and think it’s quite good.
If this wasn’t a loan book it would enter my bookshelf along with the other books about the history of computing. This one didn’t quite have the pull that the others have, but it’s still worth a read.
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