Minesweeper was one of the first most popular computer games, although curiously it was designed in the first instance as a tutorial program to learn how to use the mouse. Well, it has just been revealed that Bill Gates became so obsessed with the title that literally the programmers had to cheat to calm him down.
According to an excerpt from the book “Minesweeper” by Kyle Orland, Bill Gates was so traumatized that he always tried to break the records of all other Microsoft workers, to the point that they had to delete him from his computer (via Ars Technica). Still, Gates would go to other workers’ computers to sell their records. He even once went to the office of the president of Microsoft himself to play games.
Melinda French (who would eventually become Gates’ wife) had to ask the rest of the employees not to inform Bill about new records in Minesweepers to avoid distracting him from important decisions.
Charles Fitzgerald, who was product manager of the initial Windows Entertainment Pack that included Minesweeper, had to find a definitive solution. Instead of hiding new records from Gates, Fitzgerald used a program called Macro Recorder to set an unbeatable record: solving the first level in one second. He then sent Gates a screenshot of the new record and joked that Gates’ five-second record had been “permanently eclipsed.”
After being defeated in that way, Gates had to put his addiction aside, but it was also one of the first times he really got to thinking about how machines could vastly surpass us.
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