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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.")

3 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. 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]