Western Digital Blog – 3.8.21 (3.3.21)
The most-played game of the 2000s was not Wii Sports, Grand Theft Auto, or The Sims. It was Minesweeper. The boxed minefields came preloaded on Windows starting in 1992, when the game was so mesmerizing that Bill Gates used to sneak into his friend’s office just to play. The original function of Minesweeper was to teach players how to use right- and left-click, but it was beloved decades beyond providing mastery of this skill. Microsoft didn’t remove Minesweeper until Windows 8 was released in 2012, at which point another game had taken the throne: an intriguingly purposeless indie sandbox called Minecraft.