Cruel and Golf provided two minor variations on the card sorting in Windows Solitaire. Most of the other games and applications collected for that first Entertainment Pack ended up being much more forgettable than Minesweeper. four thousandths of a penny) per pre-installed copy of the game. Divided over roughly four billion Windows installations over the decade, that current stock value comes out to about $US0.00004325 (i.e. On the other hand, even with decades of stock inflation, $US173,000 ($240,159) is a pittance of a payment for a game as widespread as Minesweeper. 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 $US10,000 ($13,882), according to Brian Dear’s book The Friendly Orange Glow. That’s not a bad payday for games that were reportedly written in employees’ spare time, without any real thoughts of monetisation. As of this writing in January 2023, though, that payment would have split into 720 shares of stock worth over $US173,000 ($240,159).

At the time, that stock was worth just under $US650 ($902). Most of the other games and applications collected for that first Entertainment Pack ended up being much more forgettable than MinesweeperĮmployees 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. “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. “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.” At that time, it was a day job and a night job - trying to write on top of ,” product manager Charles Fitzgerald said. With the book excerpt below, let’s go back to a time when, following the success of Solitaire, a group within Microsoft was tasked with making a suite of casual Windows games - called the Microsoft Entertainment Pack or Windows Entertainment Pack - that could help sell the idea of computers as something that belonged in the home.ĭespite 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. Today, of course, Microsoft is a gaming powerhouse.

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