History and Origin of Minesweeper

Minesweeper is an invention of Microsoft and was launched in 1990. Every subsequent update from Microsoft came with this game preinstalled in it. Even before Minesweeper, a wind range of ‘mine’ games existed dating back to the early 1980s.They were made especially for home computers with the most renowned version being Mined Out made by Sinclair Spectrum in 1983.

Battleship and other paper games were large inspirations towards the invention of Minesweeper. The game was in development throughout the 80’s. Features like right-click to mark a mine and the numbers, which showed players nearby bombs, were added in the latter half of the decade.

With technological advancement, Minesweeper is available online today. The credit for this goes to Shep Poor, who developed the game in 2005 and is currently upheld by Free Video Game Project.
Shep Poor’s coding is said to be one of the best in the gaming industry judging by how well Minesweeper works today without it being modified. The only developments made are for the game to perform in its natural form in the modern-day browsers.
The free version of Minesweeper is available even to this day. Though it is not preinstalled in computers, it can be downloaded directly from the Windows Store to the PC. As a result, it continues to be one of the most popular games today. Its open-source version known as KMines is free and operational in Linux and Windows.

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