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The History of Minesweeper
Minesweeper came free with Windows for about twenty years and became one of the best-known computer games there is. Here’s where it came from and what happened to it. Many office afternoons were lost along the way.
Before Windows
The idea of crossing a hidden minefield using clues about nearby mines is older than Microsoft’s game. Mined-Out, a 1983 game for the ZX Spectrum, had you walk across a minefield guided by a count of the mines next to you.
Relentless Logic, an MS-DOS game from the mid-1980s, is another early relative. Neither looked much like the grid of numbered tiles people know now.
Microsoft Minesweeper
The Minesweeper most people know was created by Curt Johnson at Microsoft, originally for IBM’s OS/2. His colleague Robert Donner ported it to Windows.
It first came out in 1990 in the Microsoft Entertainment Pack for Windows. In 1992 it was included with Windows 3.1, replacing Reversi. From then on it shipped with every version of Windows up to Windows 7.
It’s often said that Minesweeper, like Solitaire, helped people get used to the mouse. Solitaire taught dragging. Minesweeper taught left and right clicks and accurate pointing.
Officially, these were training tools. Millions of office workers trained very hard.
The standard difficulty levels come from this version: Beginner, Intermediate (16×16, 40 mines) and Expert (30×16, 99 mines). The early Beginner board was 8×8. Later versions made it 9×9, with 10 mines either way.
The xyzzy cheat
Several Windows versions had a hidden cheat. Type xyzzy, press Shift and Enter, and a single pixel in the top-left corner of the screen would change color as you moved the mouse over the board.
White meant a safe tile. Black meant a mine. One pixel. You had to really want it.
The word comes from Colossal Cave Adventure, one of the first text adventures, where it was a magic word.
Mines or flowers
A game about digging up mines drew criticism from people campaigning against real landmines. In Windows Vista, Microsoft replaced the game with a redesigned version made by Oberon Media.
It came with a flower garden theme as an alternative to the classic look. In that theme, the mines became flowers.
After Windows 7
Windows 8, in 2012, was the first version not to include Minesweeper. Microsoft moved it to a free, ad-supported app in its store.
By then there were countless versions on the web and on phones. Google even added a playable Minesweeper to its own search results.
Hi. We’re one of the countless versions.
Competitive Minesweeper
Minesweeper has a small, serious speedrunning scene. Players use dedicated versions such as Minesweeper Arbiter and Viennasweeper, which record replays so records can be checked. Rankings are kept at Authoritative Minesweeper.
Terms like 3BV, chording and NF come from this community. The speed guide explains them.
Minesweeper and mathematics
In 2000, the mathematician Richard Kaye showed that the Minesweeper consistency problem is NP-complete. That means deciding whether a partly revealed board has any valid arrangement of mines is in the same family of hard problems as many famous puzzles in computer science.
That’s why Minesweeper sometimes turns up in explanations of the P versus NP problem. There’s a million-dollar prize attached to that one, so no pressure.
No-guess boards
The luck of random boards has always frustrated some players. Simon Tatham’s Portable Puzzle Collection, a long-running set of free puzzle games, includes a version called Mines. It only generates boards you can solve without guessing.
Many modern versions now offer the same option. The guessing guide explains how these boards work.
RetroSweep keeps both. Classic boards are random, like the Windows original, and the daily boards are no-guess. Coin flips are optional.