BY SAMUEL ELLINGSON
STAFF WRITER
There aren’t very many video games that almost everybody has heard of. Save the super famous games like Mario or Pac-Man, it’s difficult to find a game more well-known than Minesweeper.
For those who have been living under a rock, Minesweeper is a logic game where players have to deduce where the bomb tiles are without clicking on one. Uncovered squares reveal numbers that correlate to how many bombs immediately surround that tile. It’s simple rules but infinite replayability makes it super addicting.
Though there were previous versions of this concept (some of which were on paper!), its popularity didn’t really explode until Windows released it in 1990. It was such a hit that Windows automatically downloaded it to every computer for its games pack.
As people began to understand the game, the next challenge was seeing how fast it could be done. Due to its simple rules, there were lots of patterns to be found, and players began memorizing sequences and clearing levels at ludicrous speeds. For example, if players saw a “one” tile on the corner of an uncovered tile, they knew that the uncovered tile had to contain the bomb. Or, more complexly, if there was a “two-three-two” next to a flat wall, players knew that all three of the boxes above the “three” would be bombs, and the squares diagonal to the “two’s” could be cleared. There are multitudes of patterns that serious players have memorized to gain more speed in competitions.
Yep, there are also Minesweeper competitions. The current world record for the fastest time to clear an expert level is 28 seconds! Since there are 99 bombs, that’s over three bombs cleared per second! It is truly amazing what some of these Minesweeper masters have accomplished.
As Minesweeper evolves in the modern video game era, there have been countless variations and new puzzles. What if the mines were on hexagons? What if there were negative mines? What if the world was three-dimensional? Four-dimensional (I’ve tried this one, it’s ridiculous)?
Hopefully, Minesweeper will continue to evolve in interesting ways, and world record times will get smaller and smaller. It is pretty cool to watch the progression of what started as a simple clicking game and see how it has grown into a massive world of grid-based logic puzzles.