[00:00:00] Nate Kadlac: I think what's fascinating with a lot of our guests is just how many of them are involved in music as well. And so I'm not surprised that this is also part of your background, Jim. Where did your love of games come from? Do you have any early memories with playing games or building games that you can share?
[00:00:16] Jim Horne: Sure. You know, I worked at Microsoft for a long time, as you mentioned, and a surprising number of people there have both math and music backgrounds. They seem to tie together. We can have a philosophical discussion about why, but it's quite common. One of the best programmers who worked for me had a degree.
[00:00:37] 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. Well, we just got done speaking with Jim Horn and Jim is. The man who brought FreeCell to Microsoft, and that was a really great conversation. Aaron, did you have any takeaways?
[00:00:58] Aaron Kardell: Well, I think [00:01:00] you'll appreciate the story, and I don't want to spoil it, of just how the game got into Windows in the first place. And I thought that was just a fun story, but I'll leave it to Jim to tell you that. Nate, how about you?
[00:01:13] Nate Kadlac: Well, if we're going to be a little ambiguous, then I will say him being office buddies with Steve Ballmer is also worth paying attention to.
[00:01:21] So, you know, Jim had a lot of great stories, especially if you're a fan of Microsoft in the nineties. I think that there's just a lot of fascinating things that he experienced in, you know, FreeCell might've just been included as a joke. But find out more, let's go to the pod.
[00:01:44] Aaron Kardell: I'm Aaron Kardell, and I'm here with my co host, Nate Kadlac. Today, we're excited to speak with Jim Horne, the creator of Microsoft FreeSell, xwordinfo. com, and also a partner in a new game, Squeezy, which you can find at iamsqueezy. com. Jim is [00:02:00] a longtime software developer, writer, and musician. From handling software development management to theatrical direction, he's a veteran of many fields in his work for prominent names like the New York Times and Microsoft, where he spent more than 26 years fulfilling multiple roles.
[00:02:17] Microsoft FreeSell was a classic game that came with the Windows operating system, being released in Windows 95 up to Windows 7. FreeSell is a solitaire card game where you have a 52 card deck, and your objective is to move all the cards to the foundation pile, sorted by suit, in ascending order from ace to king.
[00:02:36] Jim, we're thrilled you're here. I'm happy to be here. Jim, we, we always like to start out. What's your favorite game to play these days? Well, you know, you
[00:02:45] Jim Horne: mentioned FreeCell and my whole career about puzzling got started because I was intrigued by that game. I didn't invent the game, but I wish I could say it did because it's kind of a perfect solitaire game.
[00:02:56] It doesn't take long to play. You can win [00:03:00] nearly every game, like well over 99 percent of them. And if you start playing, you start thinking, okay, I got this. I got this figured out. I going to win. I'm going to win another one. I'm going to do another one. And then you get cocky and you get slammed down all in about three minutes or so.
[00:03:15] So it's a perfect logic game. I think just, it fits the human psychology of wanting to feel good about accomplishing something. And it's. Possible to do on like regular solitaire, but it's hard enough to always be interesting. So I'm going to say FreeSol.
[00:03:32] Aaron Kardell: Love it. That's true loyalty. So we'll probably do a deep dive on FreeSol here in a little bit, but you know, maybe let's rewind the clock a little bit further in your journey before.
[00:03:45] Finding and creating a Windows version of FreeCell. You know, I understand you grew up in Canada. You've got kind of a lot of diverse interests. Some of that includes music and you know, do I [00:04:00] understand right? You played music at. Antarctica?
[00:04:04] Jim Horne: Oh, I don't know where you dig out that story, but that's quite true.
[00:04:07] Yeah. I've been a musician all my life and I did a lot of theater work and one play that I music directed included a woman who worked for a eco tour company. They call it the, that took small ships down to Antarctica and they wanted to celebrate the changing over from 1999 to 2000 by having a special trip.
[00:04:28] And so they were going to have a piano player come and Since she worked in the company, she was going to be the singer and we were going to be entertainment on this small ship. That time was particularly interesting because you may not remember, but the world was about to end because of the Y2K crisis.
[00:04:42] And we were going to be at the far end of the world. So whatever happened, you know, we would be either doomed or safe or something. I don't know. We had a great time. Antarctica is the most beautiful beautiful place I've ever seen. It's got the greatest bio density of animal life anywhere in the planet during the few [00:05:00] weeks that every critter in the southern hemisphere has to get to Antarctica to do whatever they need to do to reproduce.
[00:05:05] It's just extraordinary. And yeah, I had a great time. That was my favorite gig by far. It's awesome.
[00:05:11] Aaron Kardell: You know, in terms of just You know, your interest in, in music and the theater, do I understand like you had some involvement with Microsoft theater and maybe directing some plays there?
[00:05:23] Jim Horne: Yeah, there was a Microsoft orchestra that I conducted as well.
[00:05:26] I was studying conducting and my first chance to conduct any orchestra was the Microsoft orchestra, which had some amazing players and, you know, Juilliard grads all the way to just, you know, people who had played in high school and hadn't been played for years. So that was a lot of fun. I did theater work for them as well.
[00:05:41] Music directed plays and directed a few as well. I'm a Sondheim fan. So I got to direct a funny thing happened on the way to the forum and I did a number of other plays. I think Little Shop of Horrors is one that everyone probably knows. And that's always a super fun one to, to perform and to see, I think.
[00:05:58] Nate Kadlac: I think what's fascinating with a lot of our guests [00:06:00] is just how many of them are involved in music as well. And so I'm not surprised that this is also part of your background, Jim. Where did your love of games come from? Do you have any early memories with playing games or building games that you can share?
[00:06:14] Jim Horne: Sure. Just to comment on something that you just said, Nate, you know, I worked at Microsoft for a long time, as you mentioned, and a surprising number of people there have both math and music backgrounds. They seem to tie together. We can have a philosophical discussion about why, but it's quite common. One of the best programmers who worked for me had a degree in music composition and no background formally in programming at all.
[00:06:37] And back, at least in the day, that was not uncommon. Yeah, I've loved games since I was a kid, I suppose. I have a lot of fond memories of camping with my family and playing cards with my dad or with my younger sister who can still today beat me at just about every game. She's incredibly competitive, very smart and quite humbling to play against, but it's always fun for me.
[00:06:59] Then [00:07:00] when I got into high school and university, it was just at the beginning of the age of programmable calculators. And I consider that kind of a game too. There's very specific rules about how you can construct a program and at the end, magic happens if you get the incantation. Exactly correct. I had a TRS 80, the first sort.
[00:07:19] readily available home computer. And I learned what in Canada we call the Z80 and Americans call the Z80 assembly language. And I just got fascinated by how programming worked. And then I ended up working at the university of Alberta on a system called a Plato, a computer system instruction system, and it had a game.
[00:07:42] called FreeCell in it. So, as I say, I didn't invent it. I stole it completely from this system. And so one of the first things I wanted to do when I upgraded my TRS 80 to an IBM PC was try to create a version that didn't actually include graphics except for the ANSI characters that would do the [00:08:00] card suits that were part of the standard character set.
[00:08:02] But it was the regular FreeCell game. I made it available. Before the internet happened, there was a system called CompuServe where you could upload programs and people could download them and play them. There was a thing at the time, you could make something called freeware or something called shareware.
[00:08:19] Yeah, you can download it and play it, but if you like it, here's an address that you can send a few bucks to. And I asked people to send 10 if they liked the game. And I was quite surprised that I got sort of inundated with 10 checks that just kept arriving month after month after month. So that was. My first realization that FreeSell was fun, that I liked creating games, and I've been involved in game creation ever since.
[00:08:45] Aaron Kardell: Jim, I know you compliment me all the time, you think I'm really young, but I'm old enough to be a shareware author myself, and That's great. So I'm curious, just your experience with that, you know, I know on a [00:09:00] lot of shareware offerings, there was maybe sort of a You would unlock some additional capabilities if you paid, but I think on some it was more just almost a donation model.
[00:09:10] So it sounds like which of those approaches was the case for FreeSell?
[00:09:15] Jim Horne: You know, I just made the whole game available and asked people to pay money, and I thought it was really interesting sort of as a psychological experiment. You know, Wikipedia, when it came along, did the same thing. They would give away everything for free and then ask for money.
[00:09:29] And it was successful. When I started expert info that will, this crossword puzzle website that I created, I asked people to donate and I created three different donation levels by default, you could send 10 or 20 or 50, and there was no difference between the levels. There was no difference between paying anything and paying nothing.
[00:09:49] And. It was, again, just sort of a psychological experiment for me. How many people would, you know, think that they would pay more than they [00:10:00] had to even for absolutely nothing. And it turned out a lot of people did. Eventually for reasons we can get into, we went to a model when Jeff Chen came on board, where there were certain capabilities that he added that were valuable enough that we wanted to put behind the paywall.
[00:10:16] But for the first several years, it was just this shareware model. Same as I had with my shareware CompuServe version of DOS based FreeCell.
[00:10:25] Aaron Kardell: Love it. So you write a DOS based version of FreeCell. A little bit later, I understand you join Microsoft as an intern, I think. No, I was full time from the beginning.
[00:10:38] So you join Microsoft full time. And somewhere along the way, you get the idea that you're going to write Freestyle for Windows. Walk us through that journey and how that came to be included with Windows.
[00:10:52] Jim Horne: So when Windows first started, Bill Gates was quite concerned that there was a particular and important constituency that Windows was not [00:11:00] Attractive to, and that was gamers.
[00:11:03] In the old days of DOS games had the capability because DOS had the capability of writing directly to the hardware, which meant that you could have much more sophisticated graphics, much more high resolution or only high resolution, but high refresh rate graphics. So Bill offered incentives to people that if, if they could create a game, they would collect the 10 best games.
[00:11:27] They would throw them into something called a Windows Entertainment Pack and just basically give this away for 10 or something. And basically the cost of the five and a quarter inch floppy and the box that it came in. And hopefully, and there was no copy protection on it. So it was basically, you know, just buy this and give it away copies to all your friends.
[00:11:47] And it was fun to, to try to do that. The guy named Wes Cherry created the first version of Solitaire and he created then the graphics for all the different cards. So I had these available. And [00:12:00] I thought, well, you know, FreeCell was fun to write. I wrote FreeCell. And sort of in my spare time, then I, I created a Windows graphics version of the game.
[00:12:09] And before Windows 95, there was a version of Windows I worked on called Windows NT that the time was a joint, or I guess it was started as OS2 joint project with IBM and then became Windows NT when that marriage broke up. My boss at the time did not like games. I was afraid that people were spending way too much time in their office playing games instead of doing productive work like, you know, finding bugs and getting the performance up and things.
[00:12:38] So, as a joke, I took this version of FreeCell, I inserted it into the build of the product without telling anything, anybody. And. In the about box, I put written by, and I put my boss's name in the about box. So people started mentioning, seeing him in the hall and going, Hey, great game, Dave. And he had no idea what was going [00:13:00] on.
[00:13:00] Finally, just at like the second to last check in for this version of Windows, somebody told Dave refigured it out or something. So he changed the about box to say by Jim Horn, and he put my home phone number in there. And then the last check in was he took my home phone number out. So it went out with my credit in the about box.
[00:13:22] I moved then over to Windows 95 because I was sort of interested in this consumer version. And I wrote a couple of games for Windows 95. I wrote a version of Hearts that worked where you could have multiple players playing and so on. But I also stuck the version of FreeSol into the build there. Again, not telling anybody, you can't get away with that.
[00:13:41] Now, Microsoft now is a very legitimate company and they have procedures that stop random people like me from doing random things, but it became a very popular game on windows. We do all kinds of analytics, of course, and free style was way more popular than word or Excel or, you know, any of these programs, I think solitaire was [00:14:00] slightly more popular because it's easy and everyone knows how to play it.
[00:14:03] But basically it was, you know, the top five or six of all the apps that were running on Windows for many years. It stayed in the build through Windows XP, which was the next version. There was a version of Windows called Windows ME, which we like to kind of forget about because it was a bit of a disaster.
[00:14:19] But then in more recent versions, starting I think in Windows 8, they contracted out this other company to create games and they did a fancier version with bigger, fancier graphics and music and they. Kind of wrecked the logic of the game. It didn't kind of work quite right, but it was still, you know, free.
[00:14:36] The best part about having my name in the about box was my mom got to brag to her friends who they, you know, she would go over and visit a friend and she would say, Hey, my son's name is on your computer. And she would bring up FreeSell and bring out the about box. It was saved by Jim Horne. So that was, I got a lot of good mileage out of that.
[00:14:53] And my mom got even more. That's great.
[00:14:56] Aaron Kardell: Now, mention you, you first encountered [00:15:00] FreeCell on, I believe it was the Play Doh system?
[00:15:03] Jim Horne: Yeah, University of Illinois in Champaign Urbana had created this, computer assisted instruction system, hardware and software that was way ahead of its time. It had touchscreens even, and it had a lot of built in stuff for you would create lessons and be able to track.
[00:15:20] Completion rates and have tests and be able to report results to teachers and so on. It was so far ahead of its time and the hardware was so expensive that it never really took off. And when general purpose microcomputers like PCs and Macs became more readily available, it was There was just no market for it, but it included a version of this game, Freestyle.
[00:15:41] That's where I first heard about it. And the game has some history going well before that, too, under different names. The Wikipedia article talks a little about the history. But again, I was just so intrigued by this game because I thought it was, as I said, the perfect, perfect solitaire game. And it [00:16:00] was a great game.
[00:16:01] test for me to see if I could program something to do that. A little geeky note, I actually use something called recursion in the game to figure out if a move is possible and how to move the cards. This is something that computer science students learn in school, but you never ever use in production code.
[00:16:17] And yet, Maybe the only example of Microsoft is there's examples of recursion in FreeCell that shipped for years and years and years.
[00:16:26] Nate Kadlac: Well, I enjoy that the FreeCell game was essentially a joke slipped into the production of a Windows operating system. Microsoft operating system. That's great. I'm kind of curious though, I read something about, could you tell us a little bit about the time you ended up spending being office neighbors with Steve Ballmer over at Microsoft?
[00:16:46] Jim Horne: You have done interesting research. Steve Ballmer is a famously loud person. And man who hired me, his name is Brian Valentine, also incredibly boisterous. [00:17:00] And when I first started at Microsoft, I shared an office for a couple of days with a guy named Eric Reiter, who went on to become quite a big shot at Microsoft.
[00:17:09] But because I was hired as a, as a lead, I got a private office. So I was stuck in between these two incredibly loud, boisterous people who would have. arguments at top volume and everyone asked me, like, how could I like concentrate? How could I stand this? But I learned so much about the company. Steve Ballmer at the time was the vice president of windows.
[00:17:30] And so all the strategy stuff that was going on got hammered out through loud conversations right across the wall for me. And I could hear pretty much every word. It gave me a lot of insights into how Microsoft worked at a high level. And, you know, when I would have meetings with Bill Gates later, it informed my.
[00:17:48] Approach about how to like talk about these things in a way that executives cared about and understood. But yeah, that was, it was entertaining for sure. You know, I joined Microsoft because I wanted to work for a small [00:18:00] software company, which it was at the time. So I utterly failed in that long term plan.
[00:18:04] But at the time, I think Microsoft had around 1, 500 people and maybe about 400 or 500 of those were programmers working on mostly Windows and Office. So. It was, everybody kind of knew everybody. It was a fun environment. And yeah, Steve Ballmer taught me a lot. I'm a big fan of both Steve and Bill. They come under criticism for one reason or another.
[00:18:27] I doubt Bill Gates, for example, tracks you through the vaccines that go into your arm. But they did a remarkable thing. They took a dream about what personal software could do and made a big industry that, you know, helped change the world. It's one of the most important. Companies that grew up in the eighties and between them and Steve Jobs, his little company down in California, you know, the world is a lot different place.
[00:18:54] Nate Kadlac: Yeah, it really is. So you were at Microsoft till about 2015. Is that right? [00:19:00]
[00:19:00] Jim Horne: Yeah, thereabouts. Yeah. I started in 88. I worked for about 11 years. I, I, Took five years off to do other projects, came back, did another 10 year stint, so yeah, that adds up to about 2015.
[00:19:15] Nate Kadlac: And then, kind of some overlap there was, you were writing for the New York Times, is that right?
[00:19:22] Jim Horne: Yeah, one of my jobs at Microsoft, I was hired to be a, run this new group because Bill was interested in, This new thing called blogging. And I didn't really know anything about blogging and neither did anybody else at Microsoft. We didn't really care about it, but well, maybe it should be investigated. So I started this group to investigate that.
[00:19:41] And I was thinking one night I was lying in bed doing the crossword puzzle, which I usually did just before I went to sleep. And I said, well, I should, I should start a blog. I should figure out why people find it interesting to blog. What's this all about? But like, what am I going to write about it? I wanted to like write a blog every day for a whole month.
[00:19:58] You know what, I'm going to run [00:20:00] out of ideas very quickly. And of course the inspiration was right, literally in front of my nose, the crossword puzzle was there. And I thought, well, Will Short sends me something new every day. I like, Working on crosswords among many other games. So well, I could start a blog about crosswords So I did that and I was quite worried because I knew that I was like posting The complete grid with the answers on the blog every day and I knew that the New York Times was not gonna like that This is their copyrighted material after all I was expecting any day to get a call from a lawyer at the New York Times With a cease and desist request.
[00:20:38] And eventually I did get that call a couple of months in. And the call was, by the way, we're starting a blog on the New York times called wordplay, and we would like you to write it. Would you be interested? And so I thought, well, that, that sounds fun. So yeah, while. I was still working at Microsoft. I got this second gig writing wordplay.
[00:20:58] I got to go to the New York times [00:21:00] office, several times. I got to sit in on a New York times page one meeting where all the editors, you know, hammer out what's going to be on the next day's page one in what order. It was really fascinating and wordplay I lasted for three years. It's now run by a woman named Deb Amlin, who is great, and she has a big staff, and there's like four or five people who write different posts every week.
[00:21:23] And it's become quite an important thing. And that expanded when New York Times Games picked up Wordle and Connections and all the other ones, Spelling Bee in particular. They all have blogs associated with them. They all have very enthusiastic communities of people who will point out errors, who will talk about.
[00:21:45] Why a certain puzzle is great, or it sucks, or you complain about their streak being broken, or whatever. And, I hadn't anticipated that that community would be so important, but it turns out it is. And, New York Times Games [00:22:00] is a profit center for that company. It helps fund the, You might say more important work, having a news office in, in Russia or something.
[00:22:11] So yeah, it's, it's been big for the New York times and a life changing opportunity for me. I
[00:22:17] Aaron Kardell: think that was a great firsthand experience and exposure to the New York times with, the word play blog. Was it after that then that you created X word info? Yeah.
[00:22:30] Jim Horne: So I started working on this private blog, and I wanted, as I say, to write every day.
[00:22:36] But, you know, a couple weeks in, I was starting, kind of running out of things to say. So I thought, well, maybe, because some of the puzzles were fascinating, some of the puzzles were kind of boring, and I didn't want to, you know, just denigrate puzzles that I didn't happen to like. So I thought, well, in those days, maybe I could do a statistical analysis of recent puzzles and find out something like, okay, this is the most common word used in the last year, or [00:23:00] this is the third puzzle by this constructor, and they all have this particular quality or something.
[00:23:05] So I decided that I was going to take the digital cross light files that New York times used to provide for free or for if you signed up for the wordplay access. And I, you know, was able to crack that. Digital format and create a little database with puzzle information and I decided, well, you know, I might as well make it a web page because that way, you know, I can share the results with people and so that's how expert info started and that in particular was why I was worried.
[00:23:34] The New York Times was not going to be happy about it, although, as already said, that turned out to not be the. problem that I expected. It took off much more than I thought. I didn't know when I started the blog that there were already a couple of quite successful crossword blogs already. I hadn't even bothered to check.
[00:23:51] Rex Parker is the most popular one still. A woman named Amy Rinaldo has a great crossword blog where it's a sort of more [00:24:00] analytical approach to Understanding the crosswords. And they're still going to this day. So, if I'd have known that they were happily going without the New York Times shutting them down, I wouldn't have worried so much.
[00:24:11] But expected X Word info, like my personal blog, was going to be a short term project because I was clearly violating copyright at least. It turns out the New York Times doesn't go after bloggers, and it turns out that they probably realize that there's some benefit for them to have external discussions about it.
[00:24:30] And I think that's probably the case, and it meant that X Word Info became popular enough that there was enough sort of pressure on me. Both internally and externally to keep it going that it's been going all these years later. I think it started in 2007, was that right? And so it's, yeah, 2007. So here it is 2024 and it's still chugging away.
[00:24:57] I now, thanks to the work of a lot of different [00:25:00] people, have Information about every single crossword the New York Times has ever published, going back to 1942. A gentleman named David Steinberg started this project called the Pre Schwarzian Puzzle Project, where all the puzzles that predated Will Short's entry into his job in 1993 were Digitized by hand by this large group of volunteers who submitted their digitized versions and then editors went through them and we still get people finding, you know, little tiny bugs that we continue to update.
[00:25:37] And so we have this incredible archive of the history of these puzzles that reflect the times in really interesting ways. The II, for example, often reflect the concerns of being in the middle of a war. The theme answers might be, you know, the generals associated with each theater of operation or something [00:26:00] like that.
[00:26:00] It was often fairly derogatory terms about Germans or Japanese that would not fly today at all. But we're part of the common discussion at the time, the references to what were popular novels or popular movies that are many long since forgotten, but things that were important at the time. And I think it's quite fascinating to go through those.
[00:26:24] David Steinberg did an amazing thing with that project of his group of all volunteers.
[00:26:30] There's an interesting thread of before Microsoft, you created a shareware version of resale, you chased an interest and then kind of.
[00:26:39] Nate Kadlac: I saw that play out as being fulfilled in a certain way, being hired by Microsoft. You chased blogging and your love of crosswords and Will Shorts offered you a position it sounds like as a, as a blogger. It just feels like there's some serendipity at play here, just chasing your own interests. And I'm curious if you have anything to say to that.[00:27:00]
[00:27:00] Jim Horne: Absolutely. From my grandmother helping me buy my first IBM PC, which got me interested in programming, to happening to love FreeCell, to happening to, you know, when I applied for a job at Microsoft, I had no idea if I was going to be good enough to work for them, but I thought it'd be an interesting company.
[00:27:21] And, you know, they could have said yes, or no, they happened to say yes. I happened to get into a group, working on Windows that, you know, gave me an opportunity to play around with FreeCell. So many coincidences just sort of lined up. I don't think I'm unique in that though, I think. You know, everybody's life drastically changes from one maybe big decision, which university do I apply to, to some smaller decision about where do I go for a walk today in the park and happen to, oh, run into someone who becomes important in my life, so.
[00:27:53] I'm a big believer in taking advantage of those sort of serendipitous opportunities when [00:28:00] they arise.
[00:28:00] Nate Kadlac: Love that. It looks like your last post on your personal blog was 2016. When are you going to be writing more? Ha ha ha ha ha ha. Do you still love writing today?
[00:28:11] Jim Horne: I have a blog called X Word Blog, which is the code official blog of X Word Info that I link to on the X Word Info homepage.
[00:28:18] That's where I will post things about, okay, this is some new feature on X Word Info, or this is some feedback that I've got, or, so. That's the blog writing I do. I took some courses at University of Washington on fiction writing recently. And so I'm interested in exploring that. Nothing published so far, but I'll certainly let you guys know and give you a signed copy of my first major great American novel.
[00:28:42] Looking
[00:28:42] Nate Kadlac: forward to
[00:28:43] Jim Horne: that
[00:28:43] Nate Kadlac: for sure. So going back to free cell, are you familiar with this game 1 1 9 8 2 or the unsolvable instance of free cell? Tell us about that.
[00:28:54] Jim Horne: There was a, an interesting question about were all free cell games solvable. The, one of [00:29:00] the great things about free cell is that pretty much all.
[00:29:03] And in the original version of FreeCell, there was 32, 000 games and the numbers from 1 to 32, 000 were just a seed for a random number generator that could reliably reproduce a particular shuffle. Well, how many of those games were solvable? So I set up a system where anyone could participate. I want to try this out.
[00:29:23] And I would send them 10 game numbers and they would report back which ones they could solve and which ones they couldn't. And And the ones they couldn't solve got stuck in a bucket somewhere. And eventually I got through all 32, 000 and I just went to that bucket and unsolvable games were sent out.
[00:29:37] And then, you know, people who were very good at it were, you know, able to solve them. And it came down to just one game that nobody could solve. It was surprising to me that if there was any unsolvable games, it would only just be one. That's a pretty small percentage, one out of 32, 000, but I was able to create artificial.
[00:29:56] Shuffles that were obviously unsolvable and in the [00:30:00] original Windows XP or Windows 95 or Windows NT version of FreeCell, if you typed in game number minus one or minus two, it would give this clearly non random shuffle. that you could only make four moves and you were done. That the fact that there was only one in the 32, 000 was just sort of an interesting coincidence.
[00:30:19] Many people then doubted this human driven version of trying to find the unsolvable game. So people wrote programs to try to algorithmically solve the different games. I published the algorithm so anyone could create these 32, 000 different shuffles. And the first proofs that this one game was unsolvable were just brute force proofs, an algorithm that would just try every possible move, every possible sub move, and every possible move from there until, you know, your program ran for however long it took and could never find a winning solution.
[00:30:53] And that was actually, it was a good proof. It was not an elegant proof, but it was a good one. And since then, other people have [00:31:00] developed more sophisticated proofs. The more recent versions of FreeCell include much higher game numbers. I had one to 32, 000 because that seemed like a lot, and 32, 000 was close to the biggest positive integer that would fit into 15 bits in a 16 bit integer.
[00:31:20] But it was, One of the more surprising things and delightful things for me about FreeCell is that so many people were caught up in this question of were all the games solvable? And coming up with all kinds of very interesting and creative algorithms to try to figure that out. A nice little side effect that I wasn't anticipating but I was delighted by.
[00:31:40] Nate Kadlac: Did you ever want to put something On the web, like you, you created the shareware version, you brought it to Microsoft. Did you ever want to create your own game on, you know, on a website, and have that playable or had you done that before?
[00:31:54] Jim Horne: That was never a desire of mine. I liked the fact that I had created this super popular game [00:32:00] on Windows that a lot of people played.
[00:32:03] It was, I called it, I was proud of the fact that I was destroying productivity around the world by people who got obsessed with this silly little game. But I never tried to create more games. But then Jeff Chen, who had been my partner in Xwordinfo for about a decade, had this idea for a game and he approached me about, well, you know, this is something that we could.
[00:32:23] do together. He had this idea that I thought was unique, unusual, and would be fun to play. So we created this game called I'mSqueezy. I'mSqueezy. com, which as we're recording, there's been 120 games so far out in the wild. Jeff's a brilliant crossword constructor and very creative at understanding how wordplay works.
[00:32:48] He was anxious to learn more about coding websites and So I was able to help him a bit with that, but mostly he dove it into it himself, and he's sort of a self taught [00:33:00] programmer, but it turns out the internet is full of help for people who want to try to learn that kind of stuff. And I think he's created a really fun game, and I've been very proud to be able to Help him realize this little dream of his.
[00:33:12] He's got some other ideas too. And I wouldn't be surprised if there's other creations that he comes up with it. And I hope I get to be involved in reifying them for the world.
[00:33:22] Nate Kadlac: As you know, we had Jeff on episode 16, if you're curious to talk more about squeezy and it was a game that really drew me in right away.
[00:33:30] I. I immediately got it. I play it in one of my, my list of games every day, squeezes right there. And so, yeah, that's been really fun. And so I'm really cool to see you. Partner in that and be a part of it.
[00:33:43] Jim Horne: Yeah. A great opportunity for me. And Jeff is just a super fun guy to work with. So since we participating on expert info together, it was a great chance for me to that relationship going.
[00:33:55] It's yeah. As I say, he's just a super fun.
[00:33:59] Nate Kadlac: Well, if you were [00:34:00] to have any takeaways from your career that. You know, if there's aspiring game creators listening to this, what advice might you share with them?
[00:34:08] Jim Horne: You know, the hardest thing about creating a new game is coming up with an idea. There are lots of great games that you probably know about and you probably love to play.
[00:34:19] And you think, well, you know, I wish it worked this way, or I wish it did this instead. And from there to creating the actual game, that needs some work. If you, depending on your programming background, you might have to learn a whole bunch of different new skills, but those new skills are also a game.
[00:34:38] They're also fun. They also have rules that when you understand the rules and you can construct a logic around them, they're fun. You get the payoff that's better than just the congratulations payoff that you see in a game that you play online. You get a working little puzzle. I think I've already referred to programming as like magic, but it really is.
[00:34:58] In that you need to have the [00:35:00] incantation exactly right. You need to figure out the right ingredients and mix them in in the right order. But then magic happens. Pixels dance on the screen. Nobody understands how all levels of software work. You write in a high level language like JavaScript or Python, and that somehow turns into machine code that somehow generates pixels that move on the screen, through deep knowledge of which needs a lot of work.
[00:35:27] Complicated understanding of quantum mechanics that drives, you know, how modern semiconductors work. It's just a lot of different layers, but now the world gives a lot of that to you for free. You can program at a high level using a language that you can learn about on the web and practice about with the cheapest computer.
[00:35:48] And if you like games, creating games is a lot of fun. To me, at least as fun and as satisfying. And, you know, maybe you get to spread the joy to your friends or even broader around the [00:36:00] world. And that, that's great.
[00:36:01] Aaron Kardell: This has been great, Jim, and, really appreciate the walkthrough of your journey. If you want people to find you online, where should they look?
[00:36:11] Jim Horne: Well, expertinfo. com has links to send me email. That's probably the best way. Those emails will go to both me and Jeff. So. Don't say anything bad about Jeff, but that's my sort of public email address now So I'm happy to correspond with anyone who wants to ask further questions or comment on anything.
[00:36:31] You've heard today.
[00:36:31] Aaron Kardell: That's great.
[00:36:32] Jim Horne: Excellent
[00:36:33] Aaron Kardell: Thanks for being here. Jim. All right, my
[00:36:34] Jim Horne: pleasure.
[00:36:35] Aaron Kardell: Thanks a lot
[00:36:35] Nate Kadlac: Jim
