Minesweeper by Kyle Orland (Boss Fight Books) Review
How did your PC gaming journey begin? Personally, right around 1995 is what stands out to this gamer. I had SimCity 2000, Terminal Velocity (on 3 3.5 floppy discs), and Resident Evil which I played with a MS Sidewinder Gamepad. As someone with access to a PC pre-Windows 3.1 (I did data entry to sort my vast baseball card collection), I was familiar with Minesweeper but it was just one of those pre-packaged games on Windows 3.1. I had no idea the tremendous impact it had/would come to have and one of the reasons games even started to make the jump from MS-DOS to Windows. Who would have thought that randomly clicking titles would pave the way for what we refer to today as PC gaming?
Written by Kyle Orland, Minesweeper is the newest entry of the Boss Fight Books series of gaming books. As with most Boss Fight Books’ books, this one digs into the origins of Minesweeper, which actually has deeper roots than I could have even imagined. Kyle masterfully explores how this simplistic game had to fight an uphill battle to even exist on the Windows platform to becoming an absolute staple of every PC for nearly two decades.
Minesweeper reads like a history book if history books had interesting ancedotes every other paragraph. I had to make the conscious decision to stop taking notes until my second read through if I ever wanted to get through the book. Did you know Bill Gates became so addicted to achieving a high score that the developers ended up programming a bot to achieve an unbeatable 1 second game completion so Bill could focus on other things, like, you know, running Microsoft? J.K. Rowling wrote that when she was quitting smoking, she used Minesweeper as a replacement addiction.
Minesweeper will take you from its humble beginning - it is not even an original idea (see Depth Charge, Hunt the Wumpus, Mined-Out) - through the in-house beta testing (it spread through the Microsoft offices like wildfire) and ultimately to convincing a company that only shipped business software to include “games.” Long before the days of Discord and online leaderboards, Minesweeper inspired websites to track high scores and forums (even 30 years ago they devolved into fighting just like they do today). Do you know how the media immediately points fingers at video games whenever there is a horrific gun violence incident? Minesweeper was so addictive that it started a trend of games being a threat to workplace productivity (home computers were not as common as they are in 2023 and most people’s only access was at work). The media reported on it and the government wanted to take action. It is also amusing that the simple Windows Entertainment Pack caused such a concern when the amount of possible distractions in today’s workplace is tenfold and most of those said distractions do not even include the PC you would be using.
The longer you read Minesweeper, the more fascinating it gets. I, for one, have a newfound appreciation for game development. As a gamer and games reviewer, I am well versed in stories of development hell and/or delays but it is a whole different story when you are trying to get your game included in an age when games were not the norm. In a bubble, Minesweeper crawled so Xbox could run but outside that bubble, it affected the future of all PC gaming. To be honest, I probably spent more time reading (twice) and playing Minesweeper than I ever did in the last 20 years. Now, instead of Sudoku as my morning brain teaser, I played a few (20…) rounds of Minesweeper.
On a side note, anyone familiar with my reviews knows that I am a huge roguelike fan. As I was working on this review, it dawned on me that Minesweeper is a roguelike. About halfway through the book, this happened:
“Minesweeper’s randomization, on the other hand, makes it more akin to the roguelike genre that has become increasingly popular in recent years. Named after the groundbreaking 1980 dungeon-crawler, Rogue, the genre is characterized in part by procedurally generated levels, eliminating a player’s ability to memorize routes and making success in each run at least partially luck-based. Minesweeper also integrates the common roguelike feature of instant “permadeath” - forcing a player back to the start after a single mistake rather than using checkpoints to save progress - though the short length of each Minesweeper puzzle ultimately limits the frustration of this punishment.”
I did laugh out loud as my realization proved I was not completely crazy in my thinking.
Your next book should be Minesweeper by Kyle Orland. All of the Boss Fight Books’ books are fantastic and this one is no different. Trust me, I am an expert (if 2 book reviews from their library count… - check out my Final Fantasy VI Boss Fight Books’ book review by another wonderful author, Sebastian Deken). This is for gamers who remember Windows 3.1 just like I do and for gamers who think Minesweeper is a free-to-play game on the Microsoft Store (unless you run anything before Windows 8, it is no longer pre-loaded) that they will never touch.
