Creator Of Solitaire For Windows Interviewed

Thanks to B3ta for its interview with Wes Cherry, creator of Solitaire for Windows, as installed on "hundreds of millions of machines worldwide." Cherry discusses an 'Easter egg' left out of the final version ("There was a 'boss-key' which when pressed would display some random .C code. Microsoft made me remove that"), the all-important card back designs ("My fave is the dealer with the Ace crawling up and down his sleeve, which is a reference to a Grateful Dead song, 'Doin' that Rag'"), and bizarre benchmarking concepts using Solitaire ("At one point, a computer magazine proposed a SolMark computer speed test: The faster the cascade, the faster your computer.")

Comments

Re:Solitaire, the real killer-app

[PainKilleR-CE]

Actually, SMB3 is only the best-selling game never bundled with hardware, so, technically, Solitaire doesn't count unless you also count SMB1, which sold over twice as many copies (40 million) as SMB3 (18 million), and Tetris for GameBoy, which sold just under twice as many copies (33 million) as SMB3. Still, Nintendo has the top 6 and 5 of them are Super Mario titles, and #8 is SMB2 (The Sims snuck in there at #7).

Another SolMark reply

[Randolpho]

Only this one is relevant. SolMark *did* work as a benchmark! Well... once. Back in the day when I was selling computers at Computer City, running solitaire and showing how fast the cards were dealt was the best way to get folks to buy that newfangled Pentium 66 that was all the rage. We had a 486/66 installed right next to the Pentium 66. There was a huge difference, and it often got me the sale.

Nowadays there's very little visible difference. But once.... it was the best computer benchmark on the market. :)

Re:Easter egg

[erasmus_]

Given his tone during the rest of the interview, and the fact that such an Easter egg would have been found and removed a long time ago, after the employee that made it was fired, I am relatively sure he was joking. Just to be sure, a quick Google search turned up nothing.