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Creator Of Solitaire For Windows Interviewed

Posted by simoniker on from the seminal-gaming-auteur dept.

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.")

7 of 77 comments (clear)

  1. SolMark by ThetaPi · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.

    --
    "When God kisses Satan and the Incarnations applaud." "Death is dead. Long live Death!"
  2. come on guys! by BigBadDude · · Score: 5, Funny

    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!

  3. The boss key would have been redundant by AtariAmarok · · Score: 4, Funny

    ("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.

    --
    Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
  4. Hours spent working by JustJon · · Score: 4, Funny

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

  5. Stable? by RealityMogul · · Score: 4, Funny

    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.

  6. Re:Solitaire, the real killer-app by PainKilleR-CE · · Score: 5, Informative

    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).

    --
    -PainKilleR-[CE]
  7. SolMark as a benchmark by KE1LR · · Score: 4, Interesting
    "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.