TITLE
The Fierce Microsoft Battle That Led To One Of The Biggest Video Games Of All Time
AUTHOR
Kyle Orland
PUBLICATION
Kotaku
YEAR
2023
ARTICLE TYPE
Book Excerpt
FROM THE ARTICLE
Despite Gates’s direct attention, the first Windows Entertainment Pack wasn’t enough of a priority to justify taking any coder’s time and attention away from development of the company’s core productivity software. “All these guys had day jobs, too. At that time, it was a day job and a night job—trying to write [games] on top of [our main responsibilities],” product manager Charles Fitzgerald said. “So getting those things done, getting the bugs fixed, everything, getting the art up to par, getting it into the common installer—it was a big push for these guys.”“It bothered me when other people started spending company time trying to create games specifically for the Entertainment Pack,” Minesweeper co-creator Robert Donner told me.
Employees that had their games chosen for the first Entertainment Pack were compensated with ten shares of Microsoft stock and an NEC TurboExpress handheld game system, according to Donner, Ryan, and Horne’s recollections. At the time, that stock was worth just under $650. As of this writing in January 2023, though, that payment would have split into 720 shares of stock worth over $173,000.
That’s not a bad payday for games that were reportedly written in employees’ spare time, without any real thoughts of monetization. But that’s only if they held onto the stock; Horne recalled that he sold the shares he got for Freecell at some point to buy a pair of high-end stereo speakers worth over $10,000, according to Brian Dear’s book The Friendly Orange Glow.
On the other hand, even with decades of stock inflation, $173,000 is a pittance of a payment for a game as widespread as Minesweeper. Divided over roughly four billion Windows installations over the decade, that current stock value comes out to about $0.00004325 (i.e. four thousandths of a penny) per pre-installed copy of the game. What a bargain!
COMPANIES MENTIONED
Microsoft
GAMES MENTIONED
Minesweeper
EXCERPTED FROM
Boss Fight Books – Minesweeper
SEE ALSO
How Bill Gates’ Minesweeper addiction helped lead to the Xbox – Ars Technica (2023)
How do you monetize Minesweeper? – GamesIndustry.biz (2023)
Minesweeper, Solitaire, and a ’90s Moral Panic – Reason (2023)