Windows Solitaire Inducted Into the World Video Game Hall of Fame (arstechnica.com) 54
The classic Windows game Solitaire has joined such landmarks as Doom, Tetris, and World of Warcraft in being inducted into the Strong Museum of Play's World Video Game Hall of Fame. The award recognizes Solitaire's role as a significant part of gaming's history. From a report: Solitaire was first bundled with Windows 3.0. Much like the other notable bundled game, Minesweeper, Solitaire was there to serve as a secret tutorial: in a time when the mouse was still regarded as a new and exotic piece of computer hardware, Solitaire honed clicking, double clicking, and drag-and-drop skills. As a computerized version of a familiar card game, it was instantly recognizable. It was bundled with every subsequent Windows version, up to Windows 7. Windows 8 replaced it with a much more varied set of card games. The combination of approachability and bundling means that the game has been installed on more than a billion PCs, and it has likely been played by many billions of people.
Good or just there? (Score:2, Interesting)
Is it good or just the only game on most corporate Windows systems?
I never played it so I'm asking.
Just there (Score:2)
And easy to minimize and resume when your boss comes walking by.
Re: Just there (Score:2)
For the first generation IBM PC they produced a number of games. They all had fairly loud PC speaker sound effects that couldn't be silenced. You couldn't sneak and play them. But this was back when businesses that had a PC usually had just one in some public spot in the office.
Re:Good or just there? (Score:5, Interesting)
It's solitaire?
The game was designed to teach people to use drag & drop on the mouse. At the time it came out, it was a real concern that people wouldn't really assimilate that concept.
And it's probably one of the most played games on earth both in terms of overall users and use-time, so it does deserve to be there IMO despite it not being a AAA game or even all that special (it's hard to imagine solitaire being made too special).
Re: Am I the only one who hates drag and drop? (Score:1)
Choice is always good. Fast drag and drop or more precise methods. Isn't it great that they are options?
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Re: Basically the IE of games. (Score:3)
That's not how monopoly laws work. The issue with ie and Netscape wasn't that Microsoft had a monopoly. The problem was that they leveraged that monopoly to try and seize other monopolies. It's not illegal to have market domination , it's not healthy but it's a feature of capitalism. What's illegal is abusing that monopoly to kill other people's companies who aren't a threat to your core business.
And to be honest there's no evidence Windows solitaire killed the game industry
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It was simple, light-weight, and given the simplicity of it you could easily tell yourself to play one or two games to clear your head, then go straight back to work. There were no loading times of several minutes, unskippable intro movies, ridiculous hardware requirements etc. It was just a deck of cards and a pre-configured layout.
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Inventiveness is not a criteria. The criteria are influence, longevity, geographical reach, icon-status. The only one of those you could reasonably argue against is "influence", but it was designed to teach people to use the mouse and I can attest that it worked. It wasn't the only card video game of that era or the first, but it is the one that remains well known.
Nor is "coding job at beat [sic]", although I think it's funny that you think the quality of code is higher if you make more modifications to
You haven't seen Quake code then. (Score:1)
High-level coding skills and hacks in game development are very interesting indeed!
In thia case game code is comparable to crypto code in terms of skill, but with the opposite weighting with regard to security vs speed.
E.g. Quake's hack to do floating point math on the integer ALU. Or to use the co-processor as a second core, while getting the timing just right.
Or shader code, like Demo scene.
Pinball (Score:1)
Windows pinball was great. The space themed one. That's how we used to kill time in computer lab in school.
Ah, such nostalgia.
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Circus Peanuts, for instance.
Deservedly so (Score:5, Interesting)
Windows Solitaire should be included. The purpose of the hall of fame isn't to represent "the best solitaire game ever made", or "the first solitaire game ever made". The point is to recognize notable and important computer games that had a significant impact, and Windows Solitaire more than qualifies. It was the killer game for the mouse, and introduced many people the concept of interacting with a virtual constructs (the cards) inside a computer, using an analog input.
There were studies and various estimates made at the "lost" productivity because of this game, and the numbers were quite astounding. Many people who had never played a computer game before (or possibly since) became addicted to Solitaire and played hundreds of hours.
Right after I graduated high school I worked at Radio Shack (early 90s). One of the fastest ways to get an idea of the processing power of a computer was watching how fast the cards bounced off the tableau when you won Solitaire - the animation was not throttled to any FPS back then. On a slow computer it could literally take a couple minutes for the cards to all bounce away, where on the higher end machines it could complete in mere seconds.
Re: Deservedly so (Score:1)
I learned how to use a mouse more from playing (way too many hours of) Crystal Quest on an Apple IIGS. Granted, it was a shitty ball mouse with only one fucking button, so you had to use the spacebar to drop the smartbombs. Oh how I loved that game. The only thing close on the PC (circa 12MHz 286, internal speaker for sound) was Xquest for DOS where you could use the right mouse button to drop smart bombs instead.
Re: Deservedly so (Score:1)
We didn't have the concept of smart bombs when I was young. We had a number of minor calamities. The joystick cords were low quality and we had to wrap the cord around the stick to make it work. Then you'd get up to find a snack and it would take *forever* to wrap the cord again just right. Eventually we'd give up and go make s'mores.
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He didn't say it was a benchmarking tool. He said it was a visual representation that the masses could understand.
Re:Deservedly so (Score:4, Insightful)
Before PCs had accelerated graphics, it was. But that was only for a whisper of a moment in the Windows era. Long before Windows 3.x was obsolete, manufacturers produced 2d-accelerated video cards which sped up common operations like drawing primitives or text. Before that time, PCs only had dumb framebuffers, and the CPU had to do all of the work of drawing the cards bouncing away. As such, the windows Solitaire win screen actually did give a rough relative performance measurement based on CPU speed and bus bandwidth.
Obviously, once video was commonly accelerated, that measurement became completely meaningless to system performance. All you were "measuring" was how rapidly the video card could draw filled and open rectangles, and a little bit of font data.
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"There were studies and various estimates made at the "lost" productivity because of this game, and the numbers were quite astounding. Many people who had never played a computer game before (or possibly since) became addicted to Solitaire and played hundreds of hours."
I remember that study, in fact, solitaire on windows might have been the very first 'casual' game ever!
"Windows 8 replaced it".. (Score:3, Interesting)
NO it did not.. Windows 8 **REMOVED IT**, along with every other formerly-bundled game (aka mouse tutorials). microsoft instead created 'apps', initially requiring separate download from the 'store'..
apps which have frequent unskippable video ads and extort a sub out of users to remove... bloated, slow loading apps which for some reason need frequent updates for what should be stable-as-fuck code given their simplicity and use over 28 fucking years....apps which nag people to 'log in' and that spy on users... what the fuck kind of metrics are needed for simple games that have been bundled (FOR FREE and without such spying) since windows 3?
initially, oems were tasked with preloading the apps (or in hp's case, they chose something even worse).. recent versions of windows 10 bundle the software collection back, but in that newer evil 'app' form. they did the same with majong and with minesweeper.. fucking MINESWEEPER, ladies and gentlemen... is a fucking 'freemium' app with pay-to-remove ads.
f.u.c.k. microsoft.
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Ah, default (Score:2)
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Solitaire in general deserves its own mention (Score:2)
Solitaire is a phenomenally popular computer program in general. I don't think I've ever had a computer for any length of time without a Klondike implementation. It seems like it would be a good beginning programmers' exercise, since it implements a lot of simple concepts but doesn't do anything challenging like trying to play poker... or chess.
Can you take that off the computer ? (Score:1)
I think I need more mouse training (Score:1)
How about some more mouse training games, and time at work to play them to sharpen my skills!