Damien Moore: [00:00:00] It's definitely better than Sudoku, and I've been spending the last 20 years trying to persuade people to play Minesweeper instead of Windows Solitaire, but
Nate Kadlac: Welcome to the Hey Good Game podcast, where we chat with the creators of your favorite games that you secretly play in the cracks of your day. So Joseph, we just had an excellent conversation with Damian Moore of MinesweeperGame. com. And I'm curious, what were your takeaways?
Joseph Rueter: Yeah, I really enjoyed it.
Joseph Rueter: Super happy to bring it our audience and beyond. Damien's got joy and curiosity that powers him and the stories that he was telling about what he's dug up in the land of Minesweeper and what became. Minesweeper, like what happened beforehand was fantastic. And I could only imagine in my mind's eye, Bill Gates sneaking into somebody else's office to play, [00:01:00] which was such a great story.
Joseph Rueter: How about yourself?
Nate Kadlac: Yeah, I think for me, it was, you go online and you search Minesweeper and maybe the history of it. You. See, that became really popular with Microsoft in the 90s. Maybe there was like another game, but this thing has a history back to the 70s. And he kind of took us all the way back through all of the remixes and flavors of Minesweeper and mostly a game called Mine, which had been made a few times.
Nate Kadlac: But yeah, I thought that part of the interview was great. And I can't wait for you all to hear this. Let's get to the pod.
Joseph Rueter: I'm Joseph Reuter, and I'm here with my cohost, Nate Cadillac. And today we're excited to speak with Damian Moore, the creator and longtime curator of Minesweeper game. com. I think it's had other names too, along the way. Maybe now it's authoritative Minesweeper. Damon's a devoted Minesweeper player. I think that might be an [00:02:00] understatement and recorder of all things Minesweeper.
Joseph Rueter: He started playing around 1999 and has been an active member of the Minesweeper community ever since. And maybe it was like early nineties. We'll find out together. Damon's a first person known to complete the dream board and he continues to curate all. Tournaments and recorded submissions from the community that he can.
Joseph Rueter: He also created the authoritative Minesweeper, a non profit website dedicated to everything Minesweeper. From global rankings to strategy guides, MinesweeperGame. com has everything you need when it comes to this classic game. And Damien. We're thrilled you're here.
Damien Moore: No, it's great to meet you. I'm also known a bit as The Finer Miner, but in a very small circle.
Damien Moore: The Finer Miner. Yeah. Back in the days where you were searching for unique hotmail email addresses, that was one of the ones that was available, so it stuck.
Joseph Rueter: This reminds me of The King's Crusher, whom we've interviewed, but [00:03:00] that's chess, so. Oh, don't worry. I've listened to that. The Finer Miner. Welcome, Finer Miner.
Damien Moore: Yeah, I've listened to that podcast. I particularly enjoyed the Rubik's Cube podcast you started out with. Yes. Yeah. Toby Mao. That's right.
Joseph Rueter: That was back in the day. Can you believe that, Nate? We've got it back in the day. We've got an archive now. So we're kind of spread out. We're threading together some zip codes here.
Joseph Rueter: I'm in Minneapolis, Nate, you're? I'm in Los Angeles. Probably getting rained on. And how about yourself?
Damien Moore: I'm in Edinburgh in Scotland. But I'm originally from close to Vancouver in Canada.
Joseph Rueter: That's fantastic. Vancouver. Both rainy places in the world, in my experience.
Damien Moore: Yeah, you mentioned authoritative minesweeper.
Damien Moore: There's a story behind that. It's a terrible website title because no one can spell it. But it was back in the days, pre Yahoo, directories were, for the internet, were curated by humans, obviously. So if you started with an A, you'd be at the top of the game directory for your particular subgenre. So I chose that horrible [00:04:00] name.
Damien Moore: And I was top of the directory, but then, you know, Yahoo bought it. Then Lycos, everyone got involved. And now Google killed the whole directory style thing. So now it's just minesweepergame. com much easier to remember.
Joseph Rueter: That makes sense. But it redirects, doesn't it?
Damien Moore: Yeah, I've had a few sites in the past, but everything will redirect to the current site.
Joseph Rueter: OK, well, if this was actually the phone book, it would be a a a minesweeper. com.
Damien Moore: Do
Joseph Rueter: you remember like triple A
Damien Moore: plumbing or whatever it ends up being? No, there was a software company here, actually in England called Aardvark software. I know why they chose that title. Exactly.
Joseph Rueter: Exactly. Well, fantastic. So we got a little bit of your origin story here, a Canadian now searching for the Loch Ness, right?
Joseph Rueter: No. Tell us about how you moved from Canada to where you are now. And what the origin story is for MinesweeperGame. com?
Damien Moore: Well, the origin story is all Canadian. So, like most [00:05:00] people, we had a computer, had Windows 3. 1 on it, saw my dad and brother playing the game, and thought, that looks kind of cool. Clicked around a few times, blew up, and thought, maybe Solitaire is a bit better than this.
Damien Moore: But I eventually got around to reading the instructions, which very few people ever did, and realized actually those numbers are just clues for where the mines are. And then there's a high score list, obviously, so you start competing against yourself. But I only played a little bit as a kid. The main thing was really, when I was 16, I lived on a farm in the middle of nowhere on a dirt road.
Damien Moore: My entire family was homeschooled. We had a single shared computer with a 28k dial up modem. And my dad went on this really dodgy website no one had heard of called eBay. And he bought a second hand computer and gave it to me as a present. So no modem. It had had Windows 95 fit onto it even though it didn't fit the specs.
Damien Moore: And I think I mentioned we were all homeschooled. So I finished school early that summer and I had four months where I had to entertain myself. I was too young to drive, no public [00:06:00] transport, no internet. So I went searching through the games folder and Solitaire gets boring after a while. Pre cell, there's only 32, 000 games that repeat.
Damien Moore: Hearts is extremely boring, especially when you have no networking to play with anyone. So I settled on Minesweeper and I just played, like crazy all summer. And I do mean crazy. By then it's summarized in like four or five hours a day. And then I thought I got pretty decent at the time, like most people do.
Damien Moore: Little bit of hubris. And then Schoolwork started again in September, so I quit for a while and didn't think about it till Christmas the following year. But at Christmas I logged back on to see what the world records were, because we had better internet connection by then. And I was shocked to find out the world record was nearly three times as fast as my best score.
Damien Moore: But then when I looked more, all the websites that were around at the time were dead. So there was a guy who'd 1998, he created the Expert World Records. But most people just submitted scores with no evidence, so you didn't know if you could trust anything. And he eventually quit because so many fake scores were coming [00:07:00] in.
Damien Moore: And then a guy who was studying chemistry at Harvard created an intermediate world record webpage, and he had the same problem. Collected a few scores, gave up. So by the time I logged on, year 2000, there wasn't, there were no rankings, there was a couple dead websites. There's a really good website called Brian Chew's Minesweeper Tips, and that was the best strategy guide.
Damien Moore: But there was literally nothing, and I thought, well, why not start a Minesweeper ranking website? My brother at the time was programming websites for punk rock bands in exchange for free merchant tickets. So he helped me set up a really basic HTML website with iframes. It was horrible, really embarrassing.
Damien Moore: And I just emailed everyone I could find on the internet who had talked about Minesweeper and asked them to send me their scores. And that was back in the days where everything was really innocent. So if you posted a guest book, you'd say how old you were, what your job was, you'd give your email address.
Damien Moore: So I was able to contact hundreds of people. And in April 2000, I launched the website and haven't [00:08:00] really looked back. The main thing at the time was, I don't know if you could call it an innovation, but I came up with the idea of just ranking you based on the total sum of your best beginner, intermediate, and expert score.
Damien Moore: And then I set a bar that your total had to be less than 100 seconds or you didn't get it. So a lot of people, when they started logging on to the internet in the early 2000s, they'd see this world ranking complete all three levels in less than 100 seconds, and you can get on the world ranking. So that's kind of where it started.
Damien Moore: I don't know how many of you viewers know that there's the beginner intermediate expert with different numbers of minds. Probably should have started this with an explanation of what Minesweeper actually is, but we can get to that later. We'll get to that. But
Nate Kadlac: there, did you, so are you kind of implying that you defined the, the rankings by completing all three levels in under a hundred seconds?
Nate Kadlac: Is that sort of something you created?
Damien Moore: Yeah. Prior to that, there was just the two websites that collected scores for two of the levels. The actual mechanism for scoring has changed over the last 20 years because initially it was integer scores. [00:09:00] We'll probably get to that later, but around 2004 or 5 we created clones that had decimal timers and built in video recording.
Damien Moore: So now, things have changed a little bit. Sorry, I'm trying not to go into too much detail for your listeners, but there was a lot of confusion because the initial Windows timer started at 1 on your first click, the later version started at 0, some of the earlier versions had clock skipping problems, and then Windows XP came out with a 9x9 instead of an 8x8 grid.
Damien Moore: So all of a sudden you have to find ways to compare the different levels accurately so no one complains. So it wasn't really until around 2006 7 where videos became mandatory for all the scores that we settled on decimal scores in the current format that rankings are done.
Nate Kadlac: That's really interesting.
Nate Kadlac: I'm curious if you could just break down Minesweeper for those of us, including myself, some of the basic kind of rules around around Minesweeper and kind of like why you're so passionate about it still today. I
Damien Moore: think it naturally attracts nerds. It scares a lot of people away when they see [00:10:00] numbers appearing, but the math behind it isn't too complicated.
Damien Moore: Although there are over 70 peer reviewed published papers on the mathematics behind Minesweeper in various journals. you can find on the website, it's really as simple as you click on a square. If there's no mine, then the cell opens and it's empty and it spreads in all directions until it hits cells that have numbers in them.
Damien Moore: And a number just tells you that that cell is touching that number of mines. So most people will click around a few times and we'll get an opening with surrounded by numbers and they'll look for something really nice, like a corner where there's a one right in the corner. And that one will only be touching one square.
Damien Moore: So that means that square is a mine. So you start looking for really obvious things. So, like, level 1 is just a 1 touching 1 cell, a 2 touching 2 cells. You figure it out. Then it gets into really basic pattern recognition. So, for example, you might have a wall where you have a pattern like a 1, 2, 1. And from the first one, there's 1 mine in the [00:11:00] cells it's touching.
Damien Moore: From the 2, there's 2 in the 3 it's touching. And so on, and you work out through multiple numbers that it has to be a mine, safe cell, mine. And then the other most common pattern is 1, 2, 2, 1. Most patterns actually reduce down to some really basic patterns that I wrote a 5, 000 word strategy article with pictures on it.
Damien Moore: You can go look up with lots of screenshots and examples. But it pretty much just breaks down to pattern recognition. And the more quickly you can recognize patterns, the more it becomes automated and you enter a kind of a flow state. And as you get better, you start solving faster than you can react. So you're usually solving 5 moves ahead of where your hand is on the mouse.
Damien Moore: And when you get to the really elite level, you might be solving multiple places on the grid simultaneously in your head. And you're intentionally moving the mouse on the shortest path through the board, through the areas you're solving to minimize the amount of time you're wasting moving. Because ultimately it comes down to how efficient you are and how fast you are.
Damien Moore: So the top players are willing to lose 99. [00:12:00] 9 percent of their games to get that perfect game where you have that perfect mixture of efficiency. Speed and luck really, because there's still an element of luck based on the game.
Nate Kadlac: I've watched some of these recordings and I was kind of curious about that because they've, it clicks so fast.
Nate Kadlac: It looks like it's in, like it's in, it's being fast forwarded, you know, and. I myself can't even like point and click because the aesthetics of the game is still so 90s that the cells are so small. Is it purposefully kind of like maintain its design aesthetic throughout the years? It's so wild to see like games that look the same in the 90s look the same today.
Nate Kadlac: You know what I mean? What is it about that?
Joseph Rueter: We're going to get you some of those rad neon clothes from the BMX days and you can play Minesweeper. That's right.
Damien Moore: Yep. I used to have some of those horrible outfits. Yeah. You know, purple and neon green snowsuits. For sure. The basic game is fairly simple. The original version released by Windows was only [00:13:00] 30 kilobytes, and the logic is quite simple to implement.
Damien Moore: The top players can intentionally click on squares about six and a half times a second, and that takes a lot of time to hone that skill. But things have moved on. I've retired in the last few years. I'm now sort of like the curator for the History of the game, and it's now a group of elite players, essentially in Poland and China that are the top 10 players in the world competing for records, and there's about five of them that play faster than I can think.
Damien Moore: So I have an inkling of what you feel like when you watch videos.
Nate Kadlac: There's one thing, I was reading your PDF document from your first world championship, and there was a sentence in there about someone being extremely frustrated with Thinking about like six and a half times a second is what the fastest players can click.
Nate Kadlac: I guess that actually is a real reason, but I was kind of reading that like, what, what, what are you talking about? Which leads me to [00:14:00] ask which I use just a regular mouse. Is there like a specific mouse that Minesweeper competitive Minesweepers play
Damien Moore: with? I'm really not the right person to ask this because I'm too old school.
Damien Moore: So I've never had a particularly fancy mouse. Whereas a lot of the top players now, they all come from proper modern video gaming culture. So they're playing with really elite Razer mice that have multiple buttons on them that, you know, slightly modified for touch. And I'm honestly, that's out of my league.
Damien Moore: I'm just too old school for that. When those kind of mice hit the scene, I was already retired by then. But when it boils down to it, the fastest players in the world can click about 10 times a second on a spot. And then about six and a half times a second, actively moving the mouse around. But, as I said, modern gamers are trying to minimize Their mouse movement, so you can actually, the videos we have built into the versions of Mines Super we use for the rankings.
Damien Moore: They track your mouse movements and you can actually watch the trails of your mouth moving to the board, and it measures how many pixels your mouse covered during [00:15:00] gameplay. But when you're referring to tournaments, the main problem there was really just lag mice lagging with low quality computers on a network while you're uploading scores to a central screen.
Damien Moore: So one of the dangerous things with live tournaments, which is one reason why they kind of petered out by 2016, was just. The uncertainty of what your setup would be like when you turned up. The chair angle, the desktop, the mouse mat, the leg with the computer, the networking, it just might not suit your gaming style.
Damien Moore: So it gradually just fell out of fashion for pure online tournaments where you play at home and your videos are automatically loaded up to a dashboard.
Joseph Rueter: Well, that's fascinating. This has come up on the, on other conversations, but my son has taken a fortnight and he started on an Xbox and then he wanted to get.
Joseph Rueter: A Nintendo switch so that he could have a dummy player to pull the rankings down for the other players he would play with so that he could [00:16:00] build his scores. And now he's switching to wanting keyboards and mice. And we were walking through the store the other day and he stopped and all he wanted to do is hang out in the mice area.
Joseph Rueter: Like, like he was, he's like, no words from him. Just. B line straight to the mouse and like started messing around with it with his fingers and his hands. So as you're describing this, six and a half times a second, it has to be multiple buttons. Like, cause I don't think you can get one finger to move that fast.
Joseph Rueter: And.
Damien Moore: Oh yeah, of course you can.
Joseph Rueter: You can go 10 times a second with a single finger.
Damien Moore: That's if you're just stationary, not trying to be accurate, but that's for a very short burst. But for 30, 40 seconds, you can maintain about six times a second while moving. Just takes a bit of practice. I used to play piano competitively before I got into Minesweeper, so the finger movement wasn't really a problem.
Joseph Rueter: Do you force people to play with their non dominant hand? Is it, you have to play left handed?
Damien Moore: No, I mean, [00:17:00] this conversation could get really weird, but obviously there was a stage where people got bored, because you don't often, sometimes when you get to really elite level, you might not break a record for 12, 16, 18 months.
Damien Moore: So you try other things, but there was a patch where a group of us competed right hand, left handed and with our feet. So I briefly held the world record playing Minesweeper with my right foot, but then I got beaten by a guy in Germany. That's how bored we were as teenagers. But
Joseph Rueter: that's lovely. Well, you didn't have infinite scroll, but you had infinite clicks, huh?
Joseph Rueter: I think that's fantastic. Well, so this is like it's a logic game, but at some point it's you were talking about it not necessarily being logic. It's clearly a logic game to a beginner. Right, where you're doing deduction. It sounds like persons get better at this by recognizing patterns and then optimizing for speed.
Joseph Rueter: Is that the rough flow of competence?
Damien Moore: Yeah, pretty much. Like you [00:18:00] said, several people have tried to build solvers. There's about 30 published papers on different ways to build really great solvers for Minesweeper. And generally speaking, beginners almost always solvable without luck. Intermediate as high as 80%.
Damien Moore: and experts around 36 percent solvable without any luck whatsoever. But I think the luck aspect introduced a slight bit of addictiveness. Like I've had games before where I was about to break my record and the last click of the entire game was a genuine 50 50 and you get it wrong. And then of course you go online, complain to all your friends, and that's just the way gaming works.
Damien Moore: Adds a tiny bit of thrill to the game.
Nate Kadlac: It is a thrill, but it's also like when you play something Sudoku, And there's kind of like one solve, right? Like everything is just parsed together by logic and this, there's, there's chance involved, right? And is that pretty regular in every game or is there always some sort of mathematical logical solution for where the bombs, where the minds are?
Damien Moore: There are versions people have written [00:19:00] specifically to make them 100 percent solvable. But like I said, expert is only solvable about 36 percent of the time without making at least one guess. Thanks. I mean, that confuses a lot of people, because most people who have just started playing, they think there's far more luck involved.
Damien Moore: But if you sit there patiently with them and explain, that's actually not a guess, you can solve that square. No, look, if you use your logic like this, that is solvable. You gradually realize it's, you can solve most games. And a bit of luck isn't a problem, because when it comes down to playing fast, you just make risk based decisions all the time.
Damien Moore: So would you rather get something correct, or would you rather break your record? So you're willing to have a higher risk of losing games, whether it's luck or whether you just can't bother spending a quarter of a second trying to solve something. And you just go for speed over mathematical probabilities sometimes.
Damien Moore: So I'm used to playing Minesweeper for hours at a time and only winning like five games an hour. That's the sacrifice you make if you're really trying to set a record.
Joseph Rueter: It feels like Minesweeper should have a casino in Las Vegas because of the [00:20:00] addictiveness of the gamble.
Damien Moore: There was a version available online for a while where they removed luck from it and then you could play for money.
Damien Moore: But obviously within a month my ranking was too high, they couldn't match me with any other players. So, and then the same thing happened for all the other good Minesweeper players as we all ended up quitting and the site dropped the game. they just couldn't make enough money off of us.
Joseph Rueter: Fantastic. So it's a logic game and it's a luck based game and it's about speed.
Damien Moore: Yeah.
Joseph Rueter: It sounds like time on target is what makes you a good player, recognizing patterns and spending time with it.
Damien Moore: Yeah. The object isn't to win as many games as you can. It's to win a game as fast as you can. Yeah. Good. So, the community was quite annoyed when Windows Vista came out, because they added win percentage to the stats.
Damien Moore: And we're like, you guys do not understand the purpose of this game. I mean, I don't blame Microsoft, because with Windows Vista, they outsourced it to a third party company who tried to gamify it and make it cooler. And then, with Windows 8, they outsourced it to another company called Arcadia, who completely redesigned the game and [00:21:00] added an You've probably seen that, Adventure Mode, where you're a miner running through hundreds and hundreds of levels collecting gold, and that's not Minesweeper at all.
Damien Moore: No offense. Don't wanna I can't afford to piss off Microsoft. Need to keep those relationships going. They did ask us a few years ago, when Windows 8 came out, if some of the top players wanted to be on their Twitch channel. The only problem is, none of the top players wanted to spend time on that version of the game.
Damien Moore: Because it doesn't count for world records. Yeah, actually no Microsoft versions actually qualify for world records anymore because of Some early bugs, cheats, and the fact that the original version had board cycles where the games repeat. I don't know if you came across that in your research.
Joseph Rueter: It sounds like there's a lot of variation.
Joseph Rueter: I had crafted a question where I was going to ask you what your favorite version is and I think you've answered that question already like As close to original as possible, please. How would you answer that one?
Damien Moore: Well, for the world rankings, there's three official and by official, I mean, community accepted clones and also Guinness World Records has [00:22:00] accepted them as official clones of Windows Minesweeper.
Damien Moore: So as long as you submit your scores on Minesweeper X, Minesweeper Arbiter, or there's another version called Vienna Sweeper that was made for a tournament in Vienna that's still maintained. Those are the three versions that have faithful replications of the original, the original Windows 3. 1 version.
Damien Moore: Even with all the little variations and idiosyncrasies of how the mouse raises or lowers cells, all of that's built into it. It's just then they've built in statistics, history files, and automatic video recording. So I don't play on anything else except pretty much Minesweeper Arbitrary and Minesweeper X at the moment.
Damien Moore: I noticed on
Nate Kadlac: your website, again, that's Minesweeper. You have kind of like old downloads for different OS's on there. And I've always just been curious since I've been on your site, why don't you have your own game on there? It's
Damien Moore: a good question. It probably boils down to the fact I've always been a need to know programmer.
Damien Moore: So there is another really [00:23:00] good website called MindSuperOnline and that person's built an in browser game. there's another Java version that's been around for about 25 years on the internet. It hasn't changed for over 20 years. Just log into your browser and play. And if I was concerned about monetization, that's probably the route I would have taken.
Damien Moore: But the main focus of the website has always been around gathering the history of the game and providing rankings. So most of my time's spent reviewing scores submitted to the website, or you mentioned those older downloads. I've spent the last three years tracking down hundreds of versions of games.
Damien Moore: That are variants of Minesweeper that date back to the early 70s, and I've been interviewing authors and cataloging those games. I haven't published it on my website yet, but hopefully that'll be coming in a few months. But basically tracing the origins of Minesweeper back to the early 70s is my main hobby at the moment.
Nate Kadlac: Right, which is, is this a controversy at all around the original Minesweeper? Because what I read was Microsoft came out with their version, but [00:24:00] maybe it had been remixed from another game? And so, what's before that? I'm curious, what's the origin story of Minesweeper?
Damien Moore: Well, I'll do the short story, because we have limited time today.
Damien Moore: But basically, the Windows version is what made the Minesweeper genre a global phenomenon. And that was the case where Robert Donner got hired in 1989 to work on Word at Microsoft. And one of his colleagues had written a game called Mine. Because Microsoft at the time was working on an operating system called OS2 for IBM.
Damien Moore: So he asked Kirk Johnson if he could borrow his code, have a look at it, and he completely rewrote that game. for Windows 3. 0, which was just being released at that time. So Donner spent most of May 1990 and June writing Windows Mine, based on Presentation Manager Mine. PM was the name of the windowing system in OS2.
Damien Moore: But that 1989 PM Mine game was actually based on a 1988 Macintosh game by Daniel Griscom, called Mine, [00:25:00] unsurprisingly. And that was based on a 1987 game, also called Mine, that was written for a Sun workstation by Tom Anderson. And he wrote that game after seeing a person playing a DOS game called Relentless Logic in the office.
Damien Moore: And Relentless Logic was written in 1984 by three anonymous authors. They're called Wayne. Temporarily messed up their names because there's a few variations of them on the early versions. But that 1984 version was just a variant of earlier cross the minefield type games where you tried to get from the bottom corner to the top right corner.
Damien Moore: And in Relentless Logic, you were a U. S. Marine who had to get home and it told you it would beep or tell you there's one or more mines nearby, and your score was the fewest number of steps to get across the grid. So that, again, was based on earlier minefield games dating all the way back to a game that was submitted in a magazine in England in 1979 by a guy who was an apprentice at British Steel, and he had access to a mainframe computer, PDP 11.
Damien Moore: It didn't have a screen, it just printed everything out to paper, but He was inspired [00:26:00] by a variant of Star Trek with this little grid pattern, and there was already some games where he used logic to cross a grid. Because mainframe games were extremely basic in the 70s, so he had a copy of the 1978 book, 101 Basic Computer Games.
Damien Moore: And that included a Star Trek game, a couple hide and seek games where you tried to find hidden objects and grids. It included a chess game where you had to move your player from one corner to another corner. And just using that inspiration, it came with this idea. Let's say you're a soldier trying to cross a field of mines, and you have a mine detector that beeps when you're near a mine.
Damien Moore: And they scattered some rocks in as well to make it a proper minefield. But after it got published in March 1979, it took off. And for the next year, there were dozens of clones in other magazines and books. Kind of died down that in 1983, Sinclair released the ZX Spectrum, which was one of the first color computers.
Damien Moore: And someone wrote a version of Minefield called Mind Out. Where, instead of trying to get home, you're trying to rescue Bill, the galactic worm, and save damsels, [00:27:00] while avoiding being chased by a mind spreader and a spider. So you kind of turn it into a multi level arcade game, and that also went crazy for about two years, died down.
Damien Moore: But then it was that relentless logic game in the States in 84 that really, just as IBM PCs were becoming affordable in offices and homes, it was That was the big thing that really spread the genre. So, yeah, the Windows version was the first version where the object of the game was to open every single safe cell.
Damien Moore: But some of those earlier versions had introduced the ability to flag mines or flag safe spaces. But the original ones were literally just walking one step at a time across a minefield with a beeper going off saying you were near bombs. So there's this huge genre. I've collected nearly 200 games for numerous old microcomputers and mainframes dating back to the 70s.
Damien Moore: I've just been, my wife absolutely hates it. This is what I spend all my spare time on. I was interviewing people just this week on their games. So in the early summer of 1990, that's where Microsoft came up with the idea [00:28:00] of maybe by selling some games we can help people buy Windows for home, not just for work.
Damien Moore: So they had a product manager go around the office and ask people, do you have any games you've been writing at work that we can maybe release? We'll give you a few shares and a little bit of remuneration. So Donner had just finished writing Minesweeper. Well, it was called Windmine at the time, and he submitted that.
Damien Moore: He also submitted a version of Tic Tac Toe in 3D called Tic Tactics, and that got accepted. But all the programmers submitted their games, and it ended up being released in October 1990 as the Windows Entertainment Pack. And Minesweeper ended up being the standout hit from that pack. And It got incorporated two years later into Windows 3.
Damien Moore: 1. For the entertainment pack, they had a professional come in and clean up the graphics because the beta version actually had a foot as the cursor. So when you walked over a mind, it blew up. And there was also a lot of dodgy commentary in the help file because it was just banter with people at work. So they had it professionally cleaned up.
Damien Moore: The legal team came up with the name Minesweeper, which they couldn't [00:29:00] find a copyright on. Although there's a 1977 arcade game called Minesweeper. But anyways, it's a much more complicated story. It's really a genre. And that's what I'm trying to get across. It's not a story of Microsoft invented MySuper from scratch.
Damien Moore: I've talked to most of the people involved in that story, and they all made a significant contribution. But the way I like to phrase it is, Isaac Newton used to say, he got where he was by standing on the shoulders of giants. Everyone took a previous idea, improved it, tweaked it, and it was ultimately Donner's version of Minesweeper that just had all the right elements of gameplay to take the world by storm.
Joseph Rueter: Well, and maybe luck for having been in the right place with the opportunity to inject a game into Windows Entertainment Pack.
Damien Moore: It might have helped that before it got released, Bill Gates got addicted to it. You might have seen a few of those stories. He was playing it, he got so addicted he ended up deleting it off his computer at work.
Damien Moore: But then one day some people got a phone call and he'd snuck into someone else's office and got five seconds on beginner and he didn't think people would believe [00:30:00] him so he called people to come and witness it because there was a little thing going on in the office that your score didn't count unless there was a witness because you could actually edit the history file quite easily at the time to change the scores to whatever you wanted.
Damien Moore: But there's actually, if you want to know more detail about that, Kyle Orland, who is a reporter for Ars Technica, a few months ago he published a book called Minesweeper. I did some really great interviews with the people involved in the Windows Entertainment Pack. I helped him proofread a few of those stories, but really good book, I'd highly recommend it.
Damien Moore: Well,
Nate Kadlac: definitely check that out. Depending on how many shares Donner received for this game, could be the most lucrative game ever created?
Damien Moore: No, someone did a calculation and it worked out to like micro pennies a copy. And a lot, a lot of the early guys who wrote games gave the shares away. And when I first interviewed Donner, he didn't even remember getting paid at all.
Damien Moore: It's only really the product manager who remembered giving everyone something like 10 shares back in the day. That is wild. Something else you might find interesting, prior to doing the research for the [00:31:00] game, there was actually a group of people at Microsoft in the late 80s. And they founded a little unofficial group called Bogus Software.
Damien Moore: So what they did is, they would publish games amongst themselves, and then they would just pretend it was being published by the software label Bogus Software. So, Windows Solitaire, for example, that was written a few years before Windows 3. 0. There was Tetris versions flying around, Snake versions, Tic Tac Toe.
Damien Moore: I wrote a really interesting article on the site. Because I managed to come across a zip file where back in early 1990s someone had uploaded a whole bunch of these games. in early beta versions to a bulletin board system. So I managed to get my hands on two beta versions of Solitaire, three beta versions of Windows Minesweeper, and a whole bunch of beta versions for all the original games that ended up in the Windows Entertainment Pack.
Damien Moore: That was really fascinating. That was like a great moment in my life, to be honest. That's really cool.
Joseph Rueter: Well, what keeps you going? What made that a great [00:32:00] moment? What's the motivator here? The comment you dropped earlier about your significant other having a perspective on your connection is probably tied to the deepness of this interest.
Damien Moore: Yes, she's very kind and respectful. And this is my hobby. It's harmless and I find it quite productive. And actually, if I hadn't got into Minesweeper and building the website and learning about cheat detection and all those other kinds of things, building databases, I wouldn't have ended up in my current job.
Damien Moore: So I actually work for a bank and an internal audit team that specializes in data management. So all of that kind of nerdy, obsessive attention to detail, writing audit reports where you have to prove everything. So I'm not a journalist. I couldn't stand to write an article where I just told you a story with no references.
Damien Moore: I need 100 pages of detailed cross referenced notes about where that information came from, the veracity and history behind it. And I really don't, I haven't had the therapy sessions to explain why that keeps me going, [00:33:00] but that's just what makes me tick for some reason. I think if
Nate Kadlac: you've listened to any of our past podcasts, we find that, you know, there's many game creators who, and I know you maybe don't consider yourself a game creator, but people who run these websites about games monetize them in some way, or it helps them kind of stay motivated in keeping it running.
Nate Kadlac: It sounds like this is a pure passion project for you. Is that correct? Yeah,
Damien Moore: I made a decision about 10 years ago to have no ads on the website. I just thought it was a cleaner experience for users. At the time, I was hesitating. It would have been nice to find a way to monetize it, but ultimately, I wouldn't even call it a sacrifice.
Damien Moore: I enjoy it far too much. I don't really need an income from it. Obviously, if there was a way to earn an amazing income from playing Minesweeper, I would have been on it years ago. Unfortunately, unlike modern video games, it's not really a spectator sport. So like you said, if you're watching someone who's really good play Minesweeper, they're just clicking fast on some squares, and like, I don't get it.
Damien Moore: Whereas with modern games, you're [00:34:00] blowing people up, there's explosions, graphics, and crowds will gather around you. So it's a very difficult thing to monetize anyways. That's not really what I'm after in this case. It's just, it's just nice enough when you see people improving, you give them tips.
Damien Moore: Sometimes if I see a promising player, I'll write them back when they submit their scores and say, if you do this, you can improve your gameplay over here. And it's just nice seeing people improve and the average scores on the rankings getting better all the time.
Nate Kadlac: Well, it's really impressive what you've built.
Nate Kadlac: We were looking at some of the traffic going to your site and it seems like it's trending upwards, especially since like even post COVID when everybody got a ton of free traffic, 2021, 2021. Is that accurate? Have you been seeing anything change, I guess, when it comes to Minesweeper and being kind of, embedded in our culture?
Nate Kadlac: That's
Damien Moore: kind of a funny question because obviously I haven't tried to monetize the website, but as a result, I'm not addicted to search engine traffic. And so I almost, once in a while out of [00:35:00] curiosity, I check and go, Oh, okay, that looks good. I don't actively look at how many people are coming to the website.
Damien Moore: I'd say more people are coming to the website, but obviously fewer people are playing. It's more of a jump these days, because in the old days, if you were an amateur, you'd come along, there was a lot of amateurs online. But now you're an amateur, you come online, and you see the world records 28 seconds on the hardest level.
Damien Moore: And you just stare at it in disbelief, watch the video, it makes no sense. And it's really hard to get over that barrier these days. It's true of a lot of games and sports where competition has taken things so extreme it's not fun for amateurs anymore. So I don't know, I just, at the moment, the thing that's keeping me going is just adding more games a week to that database until I can eventually publish that entire history I told you about, the evolution of the game.
Damien Moore: And I also took several months out last year Where I spent the entire summer going through thousands and thousands of Usenet posts all the way back to 1993. And every [00:36:00] website I could find on the Wayback Archive engine, which is a brilliant resource. I went to 35, 000 computer magazines on that website looking for Minesweeper games and historical scores.
Damien Moore: And I actually back entered scores going all the way back to 1993. So you can now go on the historical rankings and pick a date in history and see what the ranking was on that date. I don't even want to know how few people are looking at that, but it was well worth the exercise.
Joseph Rueter: Maybe you can block that out of the SEO report.
Joseph Rueter: It sounds like a fantastic experience to just engage yourself in curiosity. And so if for nothing else, you, there's a glow in your, in your eyes and certainly in your voice when you're talking about what you're digging for.
Damien Moore: There's so many areas to explore. So I mentioned before, there's over 70 published math papers on it.
Damien Moore: And that ranges from everything from standard solvers All the way to quantum implementations of Minesweeper, where the mines aren't there until the wave function collapses. All the way to, if you [00:37:00] abstract Minesweeper into a graph network, you can actually take Minesweeper solving algorithms and apply them to looking for faults in actual networks.
Damien Moore: And there's a lot of interesting math around the game. So that draws some people in. There's also just a lot of interesting things on the side. One thing I wanted to mention around math that you didn't bring up. Minesweeper had, was featured quite extensively in the news back in 2000, because the Clay Mathematics Institute announced a million dollar prize for a problem called NP equal P, or P equal NP.
Damien Moore: But at the same time, someone published a math paper proving that Minesweeper fell into a particular type of problem called NP complete problem. It was a professor called Richard Kay at the University of Birmingham in England. But essentially what he did is, computer scientists like classifying problems by how difficult they are to compute.
Damien Moore: using a Turing machine. And one class is called P problems. And really simply, a P problem is as easy to solve as it is to prove [00:38:00] the answer is correct. And an NP problem is pretty much the opposite. It's way harder to solve than it is to prove the answer is correct. So for example, you gave Sudoku earlier.
Damien Moore: It takes a lot of work to solve one, but to check your answer is correct is relatively straightforward. And of course, computer scientists are always looking at infinite Stokoe games, infinite Minesweeper games, because that's what they're into. But he published a paper and proved that within NP, Minesweeper fell into a problem called NP complete.
Damien Moore: And that's literally where you reduce NP problems into a pattern. And every problem that's NP complete, if you can solve one of them effectively, you can solve all of them. Because they've proven they all rely on the same underlying complexity. I don't know how to explain it any better than that. But essentially, if you can solve an infinite grid of Minesweeper effectively, and there's a mathematical definition of what effective means, then you've solved the n equal np problem.
Damien Moore: There's a million dollar prize on offer. But it also means you'd be able to crack a lot of modern [00:39:00] cryptography and solve some more interesting problems that might make you a lot more money than that one million. So it was all over in the news in 2000, playing, solving Minesweeper can win you a million dollar prize.
Damien Moore: I got excited until I saw the math paper and realized that's not what that meant. And then, it's just interesting seeing how it's impacted culture, really. In Kyle's Minesweeper book, he spends an entire chapter around how people were so worried about the hours being wasted at work. Or the social decline from people playing games at work.
Damien Moore: And then you always get a celebrity boost in the news. Like, for example, in the early 2000s, J. K. Rowling used Minesweeper to break her smoking habit when she was writing books. So Minesweeper keeps popping up in the news here and there. So has
Nate Kadlac: that
Damien Moore: prize ever been claimed? Well, almost all mathematicians believe that P does not equal NP.
Damien Moore: The only problem is it's almost impossible to prove it. And people have been trying to solve it for decades and no one's really come close yet. So it's probably going to remain one of those unanswered questions in math.
Nate Kadlac: What a brilliant [00:40:00] marketing stunt though. For Minesweeper. Yeah. Come out with it. At the time?
Nate Kadlac: Come Well, even just, you know, coming out with a problem that can't really be solved but get a bunch of people playing this game and maybe that tactic could be applied to other things, is all I'm getting at. Yeah, I wish that
Damien Moore: had been my strategy. I definitely didn't come up with that prize for the benefit of Minesweeper.
Damien Moore: It was just a really nice circumstance that that paper came out just before the prize was announced. so a person wrote a paper, I think it was in Scientific American, Basically announcing the Minesweeper million dollar prize connection that was quite popular at the time.
Nate Kadlac: You mentioned a few celebrities who have played this, obviously Bill Gates, and who else comes to mind that has sort of like entered this weird sphere of Minesweeper?
Damien Moore: Well, I mentioned J. K. Rowling. She posted a few things on her blog about how addicted she was getting and basically just how instead of fidgeting, she managed to use that to cure her smoking addiction. [00:41:00] That obviously led to some confusion because someone read her post, went to my website, And then a whole bunch of articles appeared in Scottish newspapers saying J.
Damien Moore: K. Rowling is one of the best 100 Mindsweeper players in the world, which was not the case at all. She barely cracked 100 seconds on the hard level, so at the time she wouldn't have even qualified for the world ranking, but hey, any publicity is good publicity, they say, right?
Joseph Rueter: So if you're going to help J.
Joseph Rueter: K. crack the world ranking, what, what needs to be done?
Damien Moore: Like I said, it boils down to memorizing the most obvious patterns. You can solve almost all beginner and intermediate games just off two really common patterns. And then if you start realizing those patterns, well, we call it pattern reduction. So if you get a really complicated situation of numbers and you know where some of the minds are, you can reduce those numbers to what they would be if those minds, if you subtract the minds from the numbers, basically, and quite often that reduces numbers into lower numbers that then are aggregations of patterns you recognize.
Damien Moore: So, [00:42:00] it's basically just taking pattern recognition to the extreme and then it's just practicing your accuracy with your mouse movement, practicing efficiency. So for the world ranking, there's the time rankings. There's also a solving rate ranking, which is totally different. So boards have different difficulty levels.
Damien Moore: So you could get an expert board that's twice as hard to solve as another expert board. And by hard, I mean the number of clicks required to solve it. So, you might solve a really hard board. extremely fast and have a great solving per second ratio, but you won't be anywhere near your fastest time, because your fastest times tend to be made on boards that are easier than average.
Damien Moore: So an average expert board, if you knew where all the mines were, can be completed in about 167 clicks, whereas most of the world record games are in the 120 to 135 click, and most of the solving rate records are closer to 200 click games. And then we have another ranking called the index of efficiency, and that's looking [00:43:00] at, you take the theoretical minimum number of clicks, and then you measure it against your actual number of clicks, and there's the techniques you can do where you can actually beat the theoretical efficiency barrier.
Damien Moore: So on some level, so we have specialized rankings for efficiency. So for example, if you press the right mouse button down on a flag. And instead of releasing it, as part of that motion, you start pressing your left finger down on the left button, and then you slide off and release on a number, then you've reduced what should have been down up, down up, into down down up.
Damien Moore: So you've just taken one third of the time off the clicking movement. And there's also ways to use cording, which is where you press both buttons at the same time on a number, That's already touching flags to open up more than one cell at a time. If you do all these different combinations, you can actually become very efficient at solving boards.
Damien Moore: And that's the one strategy I still use, because I'm now old, my hand doesn't work anymore. So I just play for efficiency, and I'll play [00:44:00] at like one tenth my normal speed, just looking at every situation, what's the most efficient way I can solve the scenario I'm looking at. So I'm still in, like, near the top on the efficiency rankings, but I'm no longer in the top 20 on any of the speed rankings.
Joseph Rueter: Wow, so pattern recognition, speed, and wild dexterity in your dominant hand.
Damien Moore: Yeah, and efficiency. And there's also a whole other layer of the game around luck. So there's seven different strategies for how to attack a scenario where you're uncertain, and it ranges from, I don't care, I'm going to just guess, I want to prioritize speed, and I have no risk aversion to losing, all the way to calculating the probabilities.
Damien Moore: But that's where the math of my theory gets quite tricky, because sometimes, locally, you can't solve something, but globally you can. But most people don't have the patience to do a global solve. to understand the local situation they're currently trying to solve. So it depends what you're after. There's about seven different ways to approach guessing on top of efficiency, [00:45:00] speed, dexterity, and the other pattern recognition.
Joseph Rueter: So fantastic.
Damien Moore: But that's one of the things that's great, because if you can't measure something, you can't improve. So back when the community started getting professional in 2000, there were no statistics. There was no way to measure board difficulty, there was just how many integral seconds did it take to solve the game.
Damien Moore: Whereas now we have all sorts of things, like we have board difficulty ratings, index of efficiency, throughput ratings, mouse path, and there's all sorts of techniques, so you can hone in. I did a graph a few years ago, and in the olden days, as in 20 years ago, it could take a year and a half to go from an amateur to getting to less than 50 seconds on the hard level.
Damien Moore: And nowadays, if you join the community, you can do it in under three months just by training, using metrics and watching videos.
Joseph Rueter: Wow. I knew YouTube was where it's at. It's lawnmower maintenance and Minesweeper. That's what, you can learn both things. [00:46:00] So it sounds like you're really engaged in the what's next for you being researching and publishing.
Joseph Rueter: Kind of like a comprehensive history of Minesweeper.
Damien Moore: Yeah, it'll probably end up being too boring and too long for anyone to read with too many cross references. I've started feeding little bits out here and there, but that's pretty much my goal. I'd like to eventually catalog every variant of Minesweeper pre 1995 and have Like, one of the things I do is contacting authors of lost games, trying to see if they have a cassette tape in their basement that they're willing to send me so I can save the game.
Damien Moore: So, I don't know, it's almost like archiving the history of something that was a passion for hundreds of millions of people.
Joseph Rueter: Yeah, it's fantastic.
Damien Moore: So Damien, can you explain what the Dream Board is? This is a really interesting question because it's central to the history of the game and how the entire modern community evolved.
Damien Moore: So, basically, when I was explaining earlier about the early rankings, it was 100 percent trust based and [00:47:00] very few people provided any evidence. And when I started the rankings, some people started for the first time to take screenshots of the game to prove they weren't just making it up. And there wasn't really a way to detect if they were fake or not, unless it was a really obvious Photoshop.
Damien Moore: But, as these pictures started being submitted to the site, this guy in Germany broke the intermediate world record with 15 seconds. And, of course, everyone wanted to see the picture of the game, and a guy in Denmark noticed, wait a second, that's the same as the game Damien played a few months ago. And we're like, wait a second, that shouldn't happen, we thought these games were completely random.
Damien Moore: Which was kind of naive in retrospect given how bad random number generators were back at the time. But then, a few months later, the same guy set a new world record, and to make things worse, it was on the board he'd made his previous record on. So, everyone went a little bit crazy going, Okay, so obviously, if the same person can get the same board more than once, something's going on here.
Damien Moore: But that led to a whole exploration where people started discovering that boards on the beginner [00:48:00] and intermediate levels actually cycle, which you wouldn't expect because if you look at it purely from a random perspective, on intermediate, there's billions of possible board combinations. But in reality, it turns out there's only just over 24, 000.
Damien Moore: And they repeat in two cycles. A 12, 000 cycle if the initial random seed is an odd number, and another 12, 000 cycle if the initial seed is an even number. And those cycles are then each made up of eight smaller sub cycles of about 1, 500 boards. So what happened is, around 2002, people also started recording their games on video for the first time, and people noticed that the game before the Dream Board was always the same in every video.
Damien Moore: So people started clicking, like, 10, 000 times. looking for the game before the dream board. And then they would sit, relax, take a sip, have something strong, and then play the dream board by memory, having watched other people's videos of how they played the game. And one guy even built a board generator that only generated the dream board so you could [00:49:00] practice.
Damien Moore: So the world record went from 12 to 11 to 10 to 9 to 8 to 7 to 6. And then people started spotting other boards that were almost as easy as the dream board. And they started memorizing those boards as well. And it got to the point where all the top intermediate records were memorized games from people who were manipulating the board cycles.
Damien Moore: And then the same thing started happening for beginner. People would see really lucky games that could be solved in three clicks. And they would play 10, 000 games, clicking on those three spots until they hit the openings perfectly and got a one second beginner game. So it actually, a lot of the top players got really depressed and a whole slew of them retired around 2003, 2004, because like, what's the point of playing this game anymore?
Damien Moore: It's no longer pure. But then what happened is a group of guys got together and started what they call Project Utopia. And the goal was to build a perfect clone of Windows Minesweeper that had truly random boards. And if you put cheap protections built into it. So starting in 2004, a game called Minesweeper Clone was [00:50:00] written.
Damien Moore: And that was the first. And then Minesweeper X was written, then Minesweeper Arbiter was written, and these official clones ultimately replaced Windows Minesweeper in the community. And they all had detailed statistics, anti hacking features, and built in video recording. so nowadays, if you come to the world rankings, you can submit your individual video, but you can also upload your entire history file with your entire gaming history.
Damien Moore: And then when you submit a video, I have a script that runs and looks at every one of your mouse clicks and charts it looking for different types of cheats or attacks. So the level of trust has gone drastically. So if it wasn't for board cycles in the dream board, none of that would have happened. It would all probably still be, I probably would have retired 15 years ago because it would have just been a fun little amateur community where you never really knew if people were telling the truth or not.
Damien Moore: You always need a little controversy to keep things interesting. Yeah. Well, I found that so interesting. I actually spent an entire summer where I built a board generator and I generated tens of millions of boards. to prove how the patterns worked on all the different [00:51:00] levels. It turns out it's a bug of the random number generator, where if the board is a power of two by a power of two, there's a board cycle.
Damien Moore: So when Windows XP came out with a 9x9 grid, the board cycle disappeared.
Joseph Rueter: I just thought maybe it was like opening plays in an NFL game. It's scripted plays where you'd play it long enough before you knew, Oh, I know the script now, which sounds exactly like what happened on the dream board.
Damien Moore: An average intermediate game requires about 68 clicks, but the dream board only needs 30.
Damien Moore: And if you think how fast a second a professional can play, you're looking at potential for a seven second game.
Joseph Rueter: Three seconds. Yeah,
Damien Moore: sub five seven.
Joseph Rueter: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Damien Moore: We started by banning the dream board, then only allowing the official clones, and then we started putting in board difficulty barriers. So if your intermediate game can be completed and faster than so many clicks, it's not allowed for the world ranking because ultimately with pure random number generators, you're going to get a ridiculously easy board.
Damien Moore: No one will ever beat. so we have difficulty [00:52:00] thresholds for each of the rankings.
Joseph Rueter: Work it down from impossible to slightly possible.
Nate Kadlac: Damien, this has been a great conversation. I've learned a lot about Minesweeper and. If, if anybody wants to follow you online, where, where should people find you? Again, it comes down to
Damien Moore: the monetization.
Damien Moore: I don't have a huge social media profile. So you found me on discord. the easiest way to find me is go to mindsweepergame. com, click on about, and I give a few of my online handles and you should be able to find me like you guys did.
Nate Kadlac: So if you have any Minesweeper questions, people can. email you there.
Nate Kadlac: Is that the best way for people to get ahold of you?
Damien Moore: Yeah, go to the site and find me on discord or just write admin at mindsupergame. com and you'll get me.
Joseph Rueter: Perfect. Joseph, any last thoughts? Well, here's to logic based games turning into deep, joyful research projects and Well, while I was here, I was looking at downloading a new Minesweeper app for my phone so that I could start [00:53:00] recognizing some of these patterns and playing it in the cracks of my day.
Damien Moore: It's definitely better than Sudoku. And I've been spending the last 20 years trying to persuade people to play Minesweeper instead of Windows Solitaire. No luck.
Joseph Rueter: I think we need a t shirt section on, on MinesweeperGame. com where that's the quote. It's definitely better than Sudoku. If you won't make it, we will.
Damien Moore: Yeah, exactly. We'd be happy to help. Someone's already done that. There's a version called Nano Sweeper where they combine Minesweeper with Sudoku.
Joseph Rueter: We've been down this path with the alternate gaming. Wonderful. Well, thank you. Enjoy the time up there. Maybe stumble into a scotch party somewhere. They have a few of those around where you are.
Damien Moore: Thanks very much. I've enjoyed the chat. If you want to know anything else, I'm always around. You know where to find me. Great. Thanks, Damien.
Joseph Rueter: Sounds
Damien Moore: [00:54:00] good.
