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

Solitaire, the real killer-app

[Zangief]

I guess that Solitaire for Windows is the only game that outsells Nintendo' Super Mario Bros. 3!

It is so unfair! SMB3 is a MUCH better game!

Re:Solitaire, the real killer-app

[PainKilleR-CE]

The numbers come from http://www.ownt.com/qtakes/2003/gamestats/gamestat s.shtm

which may or may not be reliable, as they claim they're from gamestate, but I can't confirm that. Finding sources for game sales, especially to compare over these time periods, tends to be fairly hard. It's also quite possible that those sales are only North America. Overall, though, SMB3 only comes out as the top seller if you don't count games that were bundled, and a quick search brought up another site that references this:
http://www.madison.com/captimes/business/st ories/6 0159.php
which also confirms the numbers being fairly accurate, especially mentioning SMB1 and Tetris.

you can't win twice in a row

[Dreadlord]

and this interview puts an end to the legend that says you can't win twice in a row when playing Solitaire, those who say so just suck in the game.

Re:Best Solitare Score?

[GigsVT]

Last I checked a few years ago, there were online solitaire and freecell tournaments.

Maybe you could look one of those up.

The reason I looked is because my mom beat all 32000 or whatever the number was, of the freecell games in the Win 3.1 version of freecell. Except for one. One of the freecell deals is mathematically impossible to beat.

SolMark as a benchmark

[KE1LR]

"At one point, a computer magazine proposed a SolMark computer speed test: The faster the cascade, the faster your computer."

I remember when Microsoft was doing the run-up to release of NT4 (the upgrade from 3.51) way back in, umm, 1995 or 1996. One of their arguments for moving video drivers into the kernel space was that it gave much better performance (which is true).

To demonstrate this, a MS rep at a conference I was attending showed how to trigger the card cascade on demand in Solitaire and showed it on an NT 3.51 machine and a similar-hardware NT4 machine - the NT4 machine spewed cards a LOT faster.

Unfortunately I don't remember the key combo that triggered the card spew.

Re:The boss key would have been redundant

[August_zero]

I don't know....

Consider how old windows solitaire is, and then consider how computer literate the average boss was back when this game was coded. I was still in high school back them, but to my parents and many other adults computers were these magical mysterious things only barely understood at the best of times. If I told them that I had just hacked into the Russian military mainframe they would have believed me. Telling your boss that you were tweaking some windows settings or even better fixing all those crash bugs the company had been facing would likely get you a promotion, or something.