Creator Of Solitaire For Windows Interviewed

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.")

SolMark

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.

Solitaire, the real killer-app

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!

Re:Solitaire, the real killer-app

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).

come on guys!

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!

Stable?

Got a copy of Windows 2000 (maybe other versions do this too)?

Run Solitaire and click both mouse buttons simultaneously on a card for a few seconds as fast as you can.

you can't win twice in a row

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

("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.

Easter egg

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

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

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?

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.

Much like the game...

I found that interview a complete waste of time.

SolMark as a benchmark

"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

The first true MCSE! Microsoft Certified Solitare Engineer!

to be a solitaire winner!

on a winnt based machine, press: alt + shift + 2 to be a winnar!!!!111

Another SolMark reply

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. :)

Benchmark no more

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...

Devs sue MS over bundling Solitare & Windows

The next antitrust case, the way things are going I can see it happening.

Hover!

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?

Thank you!

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....

as installed on "hundreds of millions of machines

But when will they interview the author of SubSeven?

hmmm....

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...

Best interview ever

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.

Deal Again?

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.

So does that mean...

... 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.