The most-installed game in history started as a teaching exercise. Here is how it got everywhere, and what changed when it moved online.
For about two decades, Minesweeper was the most-played computer game in the world, and almost nobody chose to install it. It came with the operating system.
Its origin is stranger than that suggests.
It was built to teach mouse skills
The original was written in the early 1990s as part of an effort to get users comfortable with left-clicking, right-clicking and reading menus — all of which were still unfamiliar to a lot of people at the time.
The mine grid was a vehicle for practising precise clicking. It just happened to be a good game.
Right-click became a cultural artefact
A generation learned what a right-click does by playing Minesweeper. That is a genuinely odd thing for a game to have accomplished, and it is the main reason the interface feels so familiar.
When we brought Minesweeper to the web, we had to solve this: on a phone there is no right-click. Long-press to flag is the answer, and it works, but it is not the same muscle memory.
Online versions added the thing the original lacked
Desktop Minesweeper had no record of anything. No history, no comparison, no sense of whether a time was good.
A daily board with a shared seed fixes that. Everyone faces the same grid on the same day, which is the small change that turns a distraction into a habit.