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

SolMark

[ThetaPi]

I wonder what my old 486 would make on that test. I think I could have played a game of 52 card pickup (perhaps several) before the cascade finished.

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]

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).

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.

come on guys!

[BigBadDude]

this is one of the most useful windows applications, not to mention one of the most stable ones!

the guy deserves more attention than this!

cheers for Wes!

The boss key would have been redundant

[AtariAmarok]

("There was a 'boss-key' which when pressed would display some random .C code. Microsoft made me remove that")

In Windows, due to the presence of frequent and random occurances of blue screens with crpytic messages, having a boss key is redundant.

Hours spent working

[JustJon]

Just imagine how many thousands of hours the workforce might have had to spend actually working if it wasn't for Wes

Stable?

[RealityMogul]

Got a copy of Windows 2000 (maybe other versions do this too)?

Run Solitaire and click both mouse buttons simultaneously on a card for a few seconds as fast as you can.

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.

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.