From obscurity to notoriety: The history of Microsoft Solitaire
Introduction
Microsoft Solitaire is still alive and strong more than thirty years after its inception. Each year, more than 20 billion (that’s with a “b” and not an “m”) Solitaire games are played through Microsoft’s Solitaire Collection, making Solitaire the most played video game of all time. That’s the equivalent of 38.194 Solitaire games played every minute, or nearly twice a day for every single person on the planet, making Solitaire one of the most, if not the most, played video games of all time.
However, the game was never meant to be such a huge hit. Even though it was a side project of an intern, it found its way to the top of Microsoft, where Bill Gates chose to incorporate it with Windows 3.0.
A product of boredom
Wes Cherry, an intern at Microsoft at the time, decided to pass the time by creating Solitaire for Windows. “There weren’t many games at the time, so we had to build them,” he adds, and so he does. Despite the fact that he was an intern at Microsoft at the time, he nevertheless found time to create a functional prototype.
The game piqued Bill Gates’ interest, and Susan Kare, the famed graphic designer who built the interface for Apple’s initial Macintosh, was called in to design the game’s cards and interface. Bill Gates enjoyed the game and gave it his approval. However, he noted that it was “extremely difficult to win.”
The game was introduced alongside Windows 3.0 in 1990, and Microsoft stated that Solitaire was pre-installed to get people acclimated to using a mouse. Because the mouse had just recently been invented and people were still getting acclimated to it, a game like Solitaire that taught players how to grasp, drag, and release using a mouse was deemed to be a fantastic method to introduce people to this new notion. In truth, it was merely a nice addition to the new operating system.
The game became an immediate classic, providing elders with a method to keep their minds fresh, young people with a chance to exercise their minds, and bosses with restless nights over all the time wasted at work.
Wes never collected royalties for the game, which is standard practice in the industry, but one can’t help but wonder if he regrets not attempting to get a modest payment when he wrote it. But he’s a happy man these days, having retired from computer work and now owning and operating his own cidery.
How Solitaire made it into pop-culture
Solitaire has been on people’s radar for so long that it has been ingrained in popular culture. Many of the characters in the TV program “The Office,” which represents the stereotypical modern office, are seen playing Solitaire. According to the actor Bratton, who plays a character named Bratton, keeping Solitaire open on their laptops began as a technique to block the internet window, which the actors would leave open in between shots when they would browse the internet to pass the time. During the filming of The Office, Bratton allegedly played “about a thousand” games of Spider Solitaire and became “very skilled at that game.”
Solitaire has gotten so popular that there is even a National Solitaire Day (May 22 if you’re curious), which Microsoft created to honor one of its most popular applications. The Registrar of the National Day Calendar declared the day to be commemorated yearly on May 22nd in 2018. If you’re wondering how to celebrate this national holiday, there are no set guidelines, but I can recommend you to play solitaire online and if you win, tweet about it with the hashtag #NationalSolitaireDay.
Personally, I spent numerous hours as a youngster attempting to win the game so that I might witness the enthralling Microsoft Solitaire win animation. Despite the fact that there is a plethora of entertainment accessible at the push of a button nowadays, Solitaire never seems to get old.