Screen from the original version of Microsoft Windows, released November 20, 1985.
Windows 1.0 (originally “Interface Manager) was released on November 20, 1985 and included several applications, including MS-DOS file management, Paint, Windows Writer, Notepad, Calculator, a calendar, card file, clock, and the game Reversi. Windows was a radical departure from DOS, upon which it was built, but although it was inspired by the Macintosh operating system, it was not it was not so much a groundbreaking innovation as a work in progress that would take years to gel. Because it was built as a 16-bit multitasking shell on top of MS-DOS, it didn’t come close to matching the smooth performance and graphical look of the Macintosh, which had its operating system built into the hardware. But it was a start—the first step in the creation of an industry dominating platform.
To promote the new system, Steve Ballmer actually recorded a video ad for Windows 1.0 that was very much like a used-car salesman pitch, complete with high-pitched screaming voice and throwing money around. Here’s a transcription of the last part of it:
“That’s right. All these features plus Reversi, all for just… (smarmy voice and facial expression) how much did you guess? Five hundred? (holds up wad of cash in left hand). A thousand? (more cash in right hand—then throws both wads into the air) Even more? No! It’s just ninety-nine dollars. That’s right. JUST NINETY-NINE DOLLARS! It’s an incredible value, but it’s true. It’s Windows from Microsoft. Order today at P.O Box 2 8 6 D O S. (reads off the address).”
The screen shows:
P.O. Box 286-DOS
Redmond, Wash.
(206) 882-8448
Ballmer ends with “Except in Nebraska…”
Cameron Myhrvold puts it succinctly, “Windows 1 was pretty hard. It was a tile-based operating system. It didn’t run very well,” However, despite its rocky start, Windows did have some high-profile developers, such as PageMaker developer Aldus and Reuters in New York, who did a whole trading workstation based on it.
Microsoft’s Final DOS Game
After publishing Microsoft Flight Simulator and Microsoft Decathlon (sometimes called Olympic Decathlon), Microsoft published its third and final DOS game, Space Simulator, in 1994 on the eve of a major milestone in Windows history—Windows 95. Grant Fjermedal also remembers his manager, John Solon, moving from working on Flight Simulator to Space Simulator. “At that point we could see the Windows interface coming. Basically Space Simulator was the last DOS game Microsoft ever published, and John, much to his credit, hand-tooled an interface that really mimicked Windows 95. He had all of the proper menu structures. It was kind of a clunky forbearer of Windows 95, but in DOS.”
Meanwhile, working with Solon, Fjermedal completed not only his Adventures in Space Simulator book for Microsoft Press, but also a 100-page user manual to accompany the product, which required working very closely with the developers.
Fjermedal tells a story that would cause any game designer to laugh—or wince. One of Fjermedal’s goals for Space Simulator was that it should be accessible to everyone. “I wanted someone to be able to sit down and just be able to use it.” One of the developers, Charles Guy, was just the opposite. “Charles was a mathematician and a theorist—a hell of a good programmer—and he had come up with a command set of menus that mimicked his own internal thinking. And he could logically explain why everything was there, but god help anyone else. And I remember just being exasperated with him, and in one meeting I’m going, ‘Charles. This is a beautiful game you’re developing. You want to open the door wide. We want everyone to be able to use it.’ And he goes, ‘Well, I’m not sure I want everyone to use it.’ It was like he was essentially saying, ‘I want there to be an intellectual threshold here.’”
Just for Fun
Certainly we put games in for fun. We thought of Windows as more than just an OS, more than a bag of device drivers. We thought of it like an application, and wanted people to have fun and have something to do with it right out of the box.
And no doubt, once we’re including games, they might as well help teach people stuff, too, like new UI techniques. Better than some dumb tutorial.
-Brad Silverberg
Even though Microsoft actually published only a few games for DOS between 1982 and 1994, games were often present behind the scenes at Microsoft, even if they were only the off-hours hobbies of developers. And so, when Windows 1.0 was released, it was easy to find a game to include, which is how Reversi was the first in a long tradition of little time wasters to be part of each Windows release.
One of the all-time favorite games on Windows was Solitaire, which debuted in Windows 3.0, but got its unlikely beginnings several years earlier in the Excel spreadsheet division.
Wes Cherry was an intern at Microsoft who, along with several members of the Microsoft Office team, had been playing around with poker AI programs. Among the other people involved were Hans Spiller, David Norris, Tom Saxon, and Ed Fries. “We were writing little poker AIs as just something fun to do on the side,” says Fries, “and we had a little front end so we could watch them play. And we needed cards.”
Cherry copied card images from a DOS game and created cards.dll, which made it possible for any program to access the card images. In an interview he said, “We had an interface so the dealer could deal hands to any set of player programs and then the AI in the individual players would bet and we’d see who wrote the best player. Of course we needed a DLL to draw the cards and so one evening I wrote the 50 lines of code or so and called it cards.dll. We were programmers, not artists, so initially we did screen grabs of a DOS solitaire game’s cards and used those bitmaps.”
Cherry later created the Solitaire game for Windows with improved card graphics provided by Macintosh interface artist (and ultimately creative director at Apple), Susan Kare. (In an interview, Cherry said that his girlfriend did most of the final art, which contradicts the more popular story about Susan Kare. On the other hand, through much of the interview, Cherry’s answers were noticeably tongue-in-cheek.)
http://b3ta.com/interview/solitaire/
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/adam_nathan/archive/2006/12/04/thoughts-from-the-author-of-cards-dll.aspx
Bogus Software
Poker wasn’t the only game to come out of the Excel division. Other programmers were also making games on the side, in part just for fun and in part to become more familiar with programming for Windows. Probably mostly the former, though.
Spiller and Norris decided that, because they were all working on games on the side, partly at Microsoft and partly at home, they didn’t want to call them Microsoft games, so they came up with a name for all of their extracurricular efforts: Bogus Software. The name took hold, and all the developers who were creating games for fun used it. Spiller even says that engineer Todd Laney also put the name into his diagnostic tools.
Fish
Ed Fries had created something on the side, as well. It started with a character-based aquarium screen saver, which he updated to a real graphical version for Windows called Fish. It, too, became Bogus Software. Then Tom Saxon created a Macintosh version and added a fish editor, which allowed people to create their own fish. Fries says, “We had put out a version that had an address on it for people to send the fish—just send fish—and instead of sending fish they started sending money. So we were getting these checks.” Fries and Saxon decided to set up a little shareware company and market the animated screensaver, which may have been the first of its kind.
For some reason, whenever Fries traveled and was away from Microsoft for several days, people would play pranks on him, such as closing off his office with wallboard and making it look like it never existed. During the Fish days, they covered his entire floor with Dixie cups and used cups filled with colored water to depict a fish. You can see them at work here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=19Jf09-3QCE
To distinguish their shareware product from the internal Bogus Software, they named their company Tom and Ed’s Bogus Software. “I ran the little shareware fish screensaver business for quite a while and sold Fish all over the world,” says Fries. “The way it worked was, you got the screensaver for free, but if you wanted to make your own fish, you had to pay to unlock the editor.”
In one of our conversations, Fries told me that he was getting ready to move and that he still had boxes of letters from people all over the world, “which I probably should have thrown away a long time ago, but I have all these boxes full of Fish letters.”
A Weekend Project
Robert Donner had released a couple of games through Virgin Interactive—Risk and Clue for the Apple II—before joining Microsoft in 1989. Although his previous creative work in games helped him get the job, he found a position in the Office division, joining the Word team just before the first version released. Working within the Word codebase, however, didn’t give him too much direct experience with the new Windows OS. He said, “Writing in Word you’re at this layer, and you’re separated from the OS, so I wanted to write a real game.”
One of Donner’s friends had written a game for IBM’s OS-2 Presentation Manager and offered him the code. So one weekend Donner took his friend’s code, rewrote it, and came up with a simple game. He called it Minesweeper.
After placing his weekend project on the internal shared servers, he began to get some feedback. Initially, the goal of the game was simply to find a path from one corner of the game area to the diagonally opposite corner without getting blown up. But one friend commented that he wanted the goal of finding all of the mines. Another colleague came and showed him how he could beat the game. “I watched him play, and he was really lightning fast with it, and I said, ‘How did you do that?’ Thinking, are there rules here? I knew how to play the game, but he was obviously much better.” Another weekend later, Donnor had added some minor features. Still, Donnor admits ruefully that he’s not very good at the game. “My wife is much better… everybody I know is better.”
At times, Donnor experimented with different features. “I think the very first version I had there were coins involved for something because of Super Mario and coins and stuff like that involved collecting coins. I decided it was too complicated. There’s no point in this thing.” Another idea he tried out was changing the mouse cursor into a shoe, and when the player stepped on a mine, “dripping a little bit of blood.” But he decided to censor himself, thinking, “This is not the way I want it to go.”
One of the major decisions Donnor made was to exclude any keyboard interface. “People were still confused about how to use the mouse,” he said. “And I said I can do the keyboard interface, but I actually want people to click.” So Donnor considered how to use the left and right mouse buttons (and even the third mouse button for those who had them) to control all operations in the game.
Within Microsoft, people were discovering Minesweeper and having fun with it. Even Bill Gates famously got involved. Donner recounts the story: “We got mail from Bill Gates at the time saying, ‘I got 4 seconds on beginner mode. Is that good? If you want to see it and verify it, it’s sitting on Mike Holman’s machine over here.’ He left it sitting there. It was a pretty good score at the time,” says Donner, “but I’m sure there was a little bit of luck involved.” Bruce Ryan did go and verify the score, but Donner had mixed feelings. “I wanted to apologize to Bill for wasting his time writing a program he spent a lot of time on. The question I really wanted to ask him was why is he playing games on somebody else’s machine?”
http://www.businessinsider.com/bill-gates-was-a-microsoft-minesweeper-addict-2015-8
Eventually, Minesweeper got bundled with Windows. Donnor notes that, in part it was because the program was small and took up no resources once it was loaded. “It was consistent; it was pretty bug free.” Not that there weren’t bug reports, it’s just that there weren’t any bugs. “I kept getting bug reports from people. No. Send me a screen shot. No. You just don’t know how to play the game.” But on the lighter side, Donner laughs when he recalls how Minesweeper replaced Reversi. “That was a nice thing to see happen, especially since it kicked out Chris Peter’s Reversi, mainly because he was my boss’s boss’s boss at the time.”
At one point, Donner added a cheat to the game. By typing “XYZZY” on the keyboard, a small dot would appear over the top left-hand corner that would change from white to black if you hovered the mouse over a mine. This cheat was actually in effect until Windows 7, when a change in the code made it so that you couldn’t put anything outside of your program’s window. Because Minesweeper’s cheat dot was drawn on the Windows screen, not within the Minesweeper window, it no longer worked.
The Microsoft Entertainment Packs
Meanwhile, there were a lot of games floating around with nowhere to go. Hans Spiller wrote, “One day a marketing type approached me about my games. He said that Microsoft was interested in marketing a recreational package for that Christmas. There would be no development support at all, but anything we wanted to do could go in, presuming it met the legal and testing standards.” The “marketing type” also approached the Bogus developers, and so those who were interested—which was most of them—started polishing their games (Spiller adds,“We wound up doing quite a bit of illicit development work before shipping”), and these became the first of several Windows Entertainment Packs. Spiller says that his Space Invaders clone was instantly rejected by the lawyers, but that his Spacewar/Asteroids clone was only rejected at the last minute.
Robert Donner says that his boss, Bruce Ryan, was most likely the “marketing type” who approached Spiller, Fries and the others. “Bruce put together these programs and collected them and they started getting distributed more widely around Microsoft,” said Donner.
The first Microsoft Entertainment Pack included card games Cruel and Golf, Minesweeper, Mike Blaylock’s Pegged, Norris’ mahjong tile matching game Taipei, a licensed version of Tetris, Tic Tactics, and a screensaver called Idlewild by Brad Christian.
Tetris almost didn’t end up in the Entertainment Pack. Licensing issues threatened to blow up the deal at the last minute, and so the marketing team made up stickers that said “Now includes Tetris for Windows!” just in case. The deal was finalized at more or less the last minute and so thousands of stickers had to be manually affixed to the outgoing game boxes.
There were three subsequent entertainment packs, which introduced, among others, very popular games like FreeCell, Pipe Dream, and WordZap. Some of the games originally seen in the entertainment packs were later bundled into various versions of Windows. Of course, Solitaire, FreeCell, and Minesweeper were perennial favorites.
Later Microsoft released a Best of Microsoft Entertainment Pack collection including Chip’s Challenge, Dr. Black Jack, FreeCell, Golf, JezzBall, Pipe Dream, Rodent’s Revenge, SkiFree, Taipei, TetraVex, Tetris, TriPeaks, and Tut’s Tomb. They also released a collection for Game Boy Color that included Tut’s Tomb, TriPeaks, FreeCell, TicTactics, Minesweeper, Life Genesis, and SkiFree.
Also in 1993, Microsoft ported several classic Atari arcade games—Tempest, Battlezone, Asteroids, Centipede, and Missile Command—to Windows and called it Microsoft Arcade.
Both the entertainment packs and Microsoft Arcade were very successful, so when people think that Microsoft wasn’t interested in games, it is clear that they saw entertainment as not only worthwhile, but also at least a small profit center—small when compared with their enterprise software.
First Console?
William Volk is a long-time veteran of the game industry. He was one of the earliest developers to work with CD-ROM, and while at Activision he was involved in the development of the first CD-ROM game, The Manhole. He remembers a conversation he had with Bill Gates at a party following the first CD-ROM Interactive Conference in 1985. He and Gates talked about graphics resolutions the advantages that Microsoft had over Macintosh because of their ability to create good graphics using low resolution 320 x 200 pixel resolutions. The Mac was trying to drive multimedia titles using 640 x 480 resolutions, and the CPUs at that time weren’t capable yet of handling the graphical load very well. Gates understood that this was an advantage, and he also knew that games were worthwhile, telling Volk, “You know Flight Simulator has always sold well for us. We actually care about that. We care about games.”
In 1984, Philips began developing CD-i (Compact Disk Interactive), an interactive multimedia CD player, that was announced in 1986, but not released until 1991. According to Volk, the main reason for the long delay was that Microsoft came out with their desktop video standard for PCs-DVI (Digital Video Interactive)-at the next CD-ROM Conference, the same year that Philips announced CD-i, which caused them to panic and spend years developing the first major digital video standard, MPEG-1. The full story of CD-i is too involved to include in this book, but the short version is that it was ultimately considered a failure.
Microsoft also wanted to get in on the action, and they partnered with Tandy, which owned Radio Shack and Memorex at the time. The Tandy VIS (Video Information System) was launched in 1992, and it was a direct competitor to CD-i and Commodore’s CDTV systems. Microsoft provided the software, a version of Windows 3.1 called “Modular Windows,” which was intended to be an embedded operating system for various devices.
The VIS was arguably even less successful than CD-i. It was sold exclusively at Radio Shack, and earned the nickname from employees as “Virtually Impossible to Sell.” It is estimated that it sold only 11,000 units before being discontinued. The Windows 3.1 version of Modular Windows was also discontinued, but Microsoft remained comitted to the concept of Windows powering devices other than PCs, and later implimentations include Windows CE and the Xbox Operating System.