Minesweeper
The grid of gray squares you clicked to uncover numbers — and the flags you planted over the mines you hoped weren't there. Bundled with Windows for years, it was equal parts logic puzzle and nerve test.
Minesweeper was created by Curt Johnson, originally for IBM's OS/2, before Microsoft first released its version as part of the Microsoft Entertainment Pack 1 in 1990. It reached its enormous audience in 1992, when it was included in the standard install of Windows 3.1 and became a fixture on nearly every PC.
The rules were simple and unforgiving: uncover every square on the grid that doesn't hide a mine, without ever clicking on one that does. Each safe square reveals a number counting the mines touching it, and from those numbers you deduce where the danger sits. Suspected mines get flagged with the right mouse button; squares you can't yet judge can be tagged with a question mark. The board came in three fixed sizes — beginner, intermediate, and expert — plus a custom option for anyone who wanted to design their own minefield.
Minesweeper rode along with Windows for two decades before Microsoft removed it from Windows 8, re-releasing it instead as a free download on the Microsoft Store. For millions of people it was the other great built-in time-waster, the puzzle-solver's counterpart to a game of Solitaire.
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