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Classic Games (Games) Entertainment Games

Creator Of Solitaire For Windows Interviewed 77

Posted by simoniker from the seminal-gaming-auteur dept.
Thanks to B3ta for its interview with Wes Cherry, creator of Solitaire for Windows, as installed on "hundreds of millions of machines worldwide." Cherry discusses an 'Easter egg' left out of the final version ("There was a 'boss-key' which when pressed would display some random .C code. Microsoft made me remove that"), the all-important card back designs ("My fave is the dealer with the Ace crawling up and down his sleeve, which is a reference to a Grateful Dead song, 'Doin' that Rag'"), and bizarre benchmarking concepts using Solitaire ("At one point, a computer magazine proposed a SolMark computer speed test: The faster the cascade, the faster your computer.")
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Creator Of Solitaire For Windows Interviewed More

Creator Of Solitaire For Windows Interviewed

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  • SolMark (Score:5, Funny)

    by ThetaPi ( 720252 ) on Thursday January 29, 2004 @07:30AM (#8122544)
    I wonder what my old 486 would make on that test. I think I could have played a game of 52 card pickup (perhaps several) before the cascade finished.
    • No way man. My friends had some 386s, but I had me a 486 DX4 100mhz, it kicked. The ultimate DOS game machine it was with its 8MB of RAM, soon upgraded to 16MB. When I played solitaire the cards flew off the screen way fast after I beat it. Of course now on my Athlon XP2500+ I don't even get to see it happen it's so fast, but that's not the point. The 486 is fast, fear.

      • Re:SolMark (Score:2, Insightful)

        by ThetaPi ( 720252 )
        Perhaps, but my 486 was a bit less powerful than yours. It was 25mhz strong and had 2MB of ram.

        My favorite game at the time (XCOM: UFO Defense) ran decently though. I still wonder if it is possible for soldier to be 130% accurate with a rocket launcher.

  • Solitaire, the real killer-app (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Zangief ( 461457 ) on Thursday January 29, 2004 @07:38AM (#8122573) Homepage Journal
    I guess that Solitaire for Windows is the only game that outsells Nintendo' Super Mario Bros. 3!

    It is so unfair! SMB3 is a MUCH better game!
    • Damn you MikeRowSoft, yet another monopoly, on computer games this time, if Solitaire wasn't installed by default with Windoze, people would have looked for alternatives :)

      Are you happy now? :)

    • Re:Solitaire, the real killer-app (Score:5, Informative)

      by PainKilleR-CE ( 597083 ) on Thursday January 29, 2004 @09:25AM (#8123177)
      Actually, SMB3 is only the best-selling game never bundled with hardware, so, technically, Solitaire doesn't count unless you also count SMB1, which sold over twice as many copies (40 million) as SMB3 (18 million), and Tetris for GameBoy, which sold just under twice as many copies (33 million) as SMB3. Still, Nintendo has the top 6 and 5 of them are Super Mario titles, and #8 is SMB2 (The Sims snuck in there at #7).
      • I can perfectly remember a NES/SMB3 bundle. I guess that if you count SMB1, Solitaire should be the absolute winner.

        I don't know where did you get this numbers, but most people agree that either SMB1 or SMB3 is the top seller in history. Who has a link to some reliable source, in which total sales are showed.
        • The numbers come from http://www.ownt.com/qtakes/2003/gamestats/gamesta t s.shtm

          which may or may not be reliable, as they claim they're from gamestate, but I can't confirm that. Finding sources for game sales, especially to compare over these time periods, tends to be fairly hard. It's also quite possible that those sales are only North America. Overall, though, SMB3 only comes out as the top seller if you don't count games that were bundled, and a quick search brought up another site that references this:
        • IIRC SMB3 wasn't bundled with the NES until the SNES had arrived or soon before, maybe not even until they switched to the snes style cart slot. Lots of people shelled out $50 for SMB3 at retail, whereas SMB1/GB tetris/Solitare is/was bundled.
        • I think SMB3 got bundled later on, but the vast majority of its sales were standalone. Most NES systems sold came with SMB1, and there were relatively few standalone copies of the game sold.
      • SMB3 was bundled with hardware! When I got my NES (circa 1991), it came with SMB3 and SMB All Stars.
        • SMB3 was bundled with hardware! When I got my NES (circa 1991), it came with SMB3 and SMB All Stars.

          SMB All Stars wasn't even on the NES. Even if SMB All Stars was bundled with the SNES, the SMB3 sales do not include sales of SMB All Stars (any more than the SMB1 or SMB2 sales do). Super Mario World was the game originally bundled with the SNES iirc.
      • Why do people keep going back to SMB3? It only outsold SMB1 in North America, and the North American record was broken by Final Fantasy VII (and Ocarena of Time for those who look only at Nintendo sales records).

        Worldwide I'm fairly sure Pokemon beats the lot of them, but it depends on whether you split them into versions or not (which is a debate in and of itself, since there are people who own both the near identical red and blue versions).

        • Why do people keep going back to SMB3? It only outsold SMB1 in North America, and the North American record was broken by Final Fantasy VII (and Ocarena of Time for those who look only at Nintendo sales records).

          In North America, SMB1 outsold SMB3 by far, 40 million vs 18 million. Zelda:OoT only sold 3.57 million in the US (ok, so only isn't the right word except in comparison to a handful of Mario titles). FFVII sold 2.45 million in the US.

          Worldwide I'm fairly sure Pokemon beats the lot of them, but it
    • It says something about the importance of giving the end-users ready and easy-to-use software and games. The majority of users don't want to spend time downloading any new games and learning them as well.

      Applications like Internet Explorer and Windows Media Player that already comes with Windows versions are also very popular, though they may not be among the best in their category.

  • come on guys! (Score:5, Funny)

    by BigBadDude ( 683684 ) on Thursday January 29, 2004 @07:41AM (#8122595)
    this is one of the most useful windows applications, not to mention one of the most stable ones!

    the guy deserves more attention than this!

    cheers for Wes!
  • and this interview puts an end to the legend that says you can't win twice in a row when playing Solitaire, those who say so just suck in the game.

  • The boss key would have been redundant (Score:5, Funny)

    by AtariAmarok ( 451306 ) on Thursday January 29, 2004 @08:16AM (#8122775)
    ("There was a 'boss-key' which when pressed would display some random .C code. Microsoft made me remove that")

    In Windows, due to the presence of frequent and random occurances of blue screens with crpytic messages, having a boss key is redundant.
  • The article has the question "Is it true that there is an 'Easter egg' embedded in Solitaire that pops up a picture of Bill Gates caught in flagrante delicto with a marine mammal?" answered yes.
    What I want to know is, what is this easter egg? It's for... uuh... personal reasons.

    • Re:Easter egg (Score:4, Informative)

      by erasmus_ ( 119185 ) on Thursday January 29, 2004 @12:03PM (#8124716)
      Given his tone during the rest of the interview, and the fact that such an Easter egg would have been found and removed a long time ago, after the employee that made it was fired, I am relatively sure he was joking. Just to be sure, a quick Google search turned up nothing.

  • Hours spent working (Score:4, Funny)

    by JustJon ( 731538 ) on Thursday January 29, 2004 @08:59AM (#8123017) Homepage
    Just imagine how many thousands of hours the workforce might have had to spend actually working if it wasn't for Wes

  • Best Solitare Score? (Score:3, Informative)

    by Ianoo ( 711633 ) on Thursday January 29, 2004 @09:18AM (#8123121) Journal
    What sort of scores do people get on Solitaire when running in timed game mode with standard scoring? About five years ago (during one of my Linux holidays before I saw sense again and switched back to Redhat!) I was running Windows 98 and used to play Sol a lot, and got pretty fast. However I have no idea how fast I was compared to other people, because I couldn't find people posting their scores anywhere on the Internet at the time...

    My best score ever was just over 11000, and I could generally get between 6000 and 10000 if I really concentrated.
  • I found that interview a complete waste of time.

  • SolMark as a benchmark (Score:4, Interesting)

    by KE1LR ( 206175 ) <ken,hoover&gmail,com> on Thursday January 29, 2004 @09:59AM (#8123456) Homepage
    "At one point, a computer magazine proposed a SolMark computer speed test: The faster the cascade, the faster your computer."

    I remember when Microsoft was doing the run-up to release of NT4 (the upgrade from 3.51) way back in, umm, 1995 or 1996. One of their arguments for moving video drivers into the kernel space was that it gave much better performance (which is true).

    To demonstrate this, a MS rep at a conference I was attending showed how to trigger the card cascade on demand in Solitaire and showed it on an NT 3.51 machine and a similar-hardware NT4 machine - the NT4 machine spewed cards a LOT faster.

    Unfortunately I don't remember the key combo that triggered the card spew.

  • MCSE (Score:2)

    by QEDog ( 610238 )
    The first true MCSE! Microsoft Certified Solitare Engineer!
  • on a winnt based machine, press: alt + shift + 2 to be a winnar!!!!111

  • Another SolMark reply (Score:4, Informative)

    by Randolpho ( 628485 ) on Thursday January 29, 2004 @10:40AM (#8123824) Homepage Journal
    Only this one is relevant. SolMark *did* work as a benchmark! Well... once. Back in the day when I was selling computers at Computer City, running solitaire and showing how fast the cards were dealt was the best way to get folks to buy that newfangled Pentium 66 that was all the rage. We had a 486/66 installed right next to the Pentium 66. There was a huge difference, and it often got me the sale.

    Nowadays there's very little visible difference. But once.... it was the best computer benchmark on the market. :)
  • At one point, a computer magazine proposed a SolMark computer speed test: The faster the cascade, the faster your computer.

    Solitaire _was_ my benchmark. After each gfx or cpu upgrade the first thing after booting was to fire up Solitaire. :-)

    I can't tell you how disappointed I was when they included timing code in W2k and later releases, so the cards always fall with a fixed speed. But, I guess it was inevitable once times went under a couple of seconds...
  • The next antitrust case, the way things are going I can see it happening.
  • My big time waster was the Hover! game that came with Windows 95. It was definitely addictive, and I wish they would have updated it as well. I've always wondered if anyone has managed to create new levels for it?
    • Actually, it only came with a very specific release of Windows 95 (the version that added limited USB support), so a number of people here wouldn't be familiar with it. It came on my old VAIO PC, though, and I will admit to wasting a great deal of time on it myself. I was only about ten back then, so anything with 3D graphics (however rudimentary) could completely capture my attention.
      • Ah, but the first place hover showed up was on the first release of the Windows 95 Upgrade disc. How do I know this? Cos when Windows 95 came out, I was 12.

        So, nya nya nya nya nya nyah! :-P
    • It still works under Windows XP last time I tried, as long as you can find a Windows 95 CD (any Windows 95 CD seems to have it since my Upgrade and OEM Discs contain the folder). And best of all it's only ~20MB if you want to run it off the harddrive instead of the CD.
  • Next to browsing on ESPN.com, Solitaire is the only thing my father uses the computer for. A 1.2Ghz Athlon rig, that only does MSIE and Solitaire....
  • But when will they interview the author of SubSeven?
  • the person who gets more people fired for playing games on their computers... DARN HIM! Why did he have to meake that game! It's too darn addictive, I was fired from my last job for playing it on the job and have had a heck of a lot of trouble getting a new jab...
  • I cracked up reading this thing. I wouldn't have imagined the creator of solitaire to be a complete jokester, seeing as there's barely any humor involved.
  • Know how after you win, it asks if you want to deal again? I always wondered why it doesn't just close if you click no. Surely, if you did not want to deal again, you must be done playing, so why not save you the extra click and close the damn thing?

    Bad interface design, tsk tsk.
  • ... I'm the only person who always plays it in Vegas mode with a one card draw? That's the only way to play if you ask me. I actually won three games in a row a couple of weeks back.

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