Minesweeper Race

Minesweeper Race · History

The history of Minesweeper Race

Minesweeper Race is a daily version of minesweeper, the puzzle of numbered squares and hidden mines that most people met on an office computer in the 1990s. That game was not the first of its kind. It grew, one programmer at a time, out of older games about crossing a minefield, and the trail can be followed back to the 1970s. This chapter follows it forward again, to the shared field you can play today.

Minefield games on early computers

In July 1973 the computer maker DEC published a book called 101 BASIC Computer Games. One of its programs was Cube, written by Jerimac Ratliff. You travel from one corner of a three-by-three-by-three cube to the opposite corner, one step at a time, while five mines sit at random points along the way. You bet play money on whether you will make it.

Cube is often named as an ancestor of minesweeper, and it does have hidden mines on a grid. The published description mentions no clues, though, so crossing it is a matter of luck. The historians at the Minesweeper Game Database list it as an original game with no known parent.

Many more minefield games followed in the 1970s, on university mainframes and then on the first home computers. The database records versions for the PLATO system, the Commodore PET, the Apple II and others. Most asked for the same thing: get across the field alive. The details of who borrowed from whom are mostly lost.

Mined-Out, 1983

In 1983 Ian Andrew, who ran a shop in Reading, England, wrote Mined-Out in BASIC for the ZX Spectrum. Quicksilva published it, and versions for the BBC Micro, Dragon 32, Acorn Electron and Oric followed. You walk from the bottom of the screen to the top across a field of invisible mines, through nine levels that add new hazards.

What Mined-Out added was a number. After every step the game tells you how many mines lie next to you, and you work out a safe route from those counts. Andrew has described the idea of giving clues by proximity as his “Eureka” moment. His detector looked up, down, left and right only. Diagonal neighbors didn’t count.

Andrew has said it would have been nice to have had a credit on the later Windows game. The record doesn’t show a direct line, however. The clue vanished as soon as you moved on, you could only step to the next square, and the goal was a crossing. The database lists Mined-Out’s own parent as unknown, and it traces the Windows game through a different family.

Relentless Logic and Mines

That family starts with Relentless Logic, an MS-DOS game credited to Conway, Hong and Smith. Its date is not firmly established. The Minesweeper Game Database files it under 1984 and describes it only as written in the early 1980s, and other accounts give 1985. It is often called RLogic for short.

In November 1987 Tom Anderson published a game called Mines for Sun workstations, written after he watched a colleague play Relentless Logic in the next cubicle. You crossed a 16×16 field from the top left corner to the bottom right. Anderson added a way to mark squares as mines or as safe, the first flags. Weeks later Brian Dalio changed the code so that the number in each square stayed on screen, and so that you could jump back to any square already opened.

In 1988 Daniel Griscom saw Mines on a Sun workstation in Boston and wrote a version for the Macintosh, which he believes he copied faithfully. By then the game had permanent numbers, eight-way counting, blank areas that opened by themselves and marks for mines. It was still a crossing game with no clock.

Curt Johnson, Robert Donner and Windows

Curt Johnson joined Microsoft in 1989 to maintain a debugger for the OS/2 operating system. To learn its graphics he wrote a game that year, PM Mine, based on Griscom’s Macintosh game. His colleague Robert Donner, who had joined around the same time, took the source code and released an updated version in May 1990. It kept the crossing game and added a Sweep mode, in which you had to open every safe square.

Windows 3.0 came out on May 22, 1990, and Donner rewrote the game for it as Win Mine. Microsoft tidied it up, named it Minesweeper and sold it in the Windows Entertainment Pack in October 1990. In 1992 it became part of Windows 3.1 itself, and for the next twenty years it came with nearly every Windows computer. Both men are credited as its authors. Johnson died in 2014.

The Windows game dropped the crossing and kept the sweep, with a timer counting up and a list of best times. It offered three standard levels that players still measure themselves against: Beginner at 8×8 with 10 mines, Intermediate at 16×16 with 40, and Expert at 30×16 with 99. Later versions of Windows enlarged the beginner board to 9×9.

Mines, flowers and the move out of Windows

Not everyone was comfortable with the theme. Land mines still kill and injure people in many countries, and a game about them sat on almost every office desktop. In 2001 a group calling itself the International Campaign to Ban Winmine asked Microsoft to pick a different subject, and a 2009 history in TechRadar notes other protests over the years. A Microsoft engineer, Raymond Chen, later wrote that the people upset by the game were understandably so.

The version in Windows Vista, released in 2007, was a complete rewrite by an outside studio, Oberon Media. The rules stayed the same, but the graphics and sounds were new, games could be saved, and a lost board could be played again. Among the changes was a choice of what the field hides: mines or flowers. The replay feature had a side effect. The world ranking stopped accepting Vista scores, because a player could now practice the same board.

In 2012 Windows 8 stopped installing the game with the operating system. A new version, written by the studio Arkadium and still published by Microsoft, became a free download from the Windows Store with advertisements, daily challenges and an adventure mode. The plain grid of gray squares was no longer something every Windows user had by default.

Racing the clock

Because the Windows game kept your best times, players compared them almost from the start. On April 6, 2000 a site called Authoritative Minesweeper began collecting scores, and it still hosts the world ranking at minesweepergame.com. Players are ranked by the sum of their best times on the three standard levels.

Fair comparison took some rules. The ranking stopped accepting Microsoft’s own versions in 2008, because of cheats, and now requires community-made clones that play identically and record a video of each game. Boards are random, so some are much easier than others. Players measure that with 3BV, the smallest number of left clicks that could clear a board, and the ranking rejects boards below a set 3BV as too lucky.

The site’s record list starts with an expert game of 64 seconds by Ruben Spaans in October 1995. When this chapter was written, the fastest expert time on the list was 26.59 seconds, set by Ze-En Ju on August 23, 2022. Times like that depend on chording, on knowing every common pattern by sight, and for some players on never placing a flag at all.

A hard problem, and boards without guesses

In 2000 The Mathematical Intelligencer published a paper with the title Minesweeper is NP-complete, by Sadie Kaye, a mathematician at the University of Birmingham. It was published under the name Richard Kaye, which is how older references cite it. The paper asks a question about a board with some numbers showing: is there any arrangement of mines that fits them all? Kaye showed that this consistency problem is NP-complete, by building minesweeper positions that behave like the logic circuits of a computer.

In plain terms, nobody knows a fast method that answers the question for every possible board, and finding one would settle one of the best-known open problems in mathematics. That says nothing against solving an ordinary board by hand. Later work looked at the question a player faces, whether any square can be proved safe. A proof that this is hard too was published in 2011, and in 2024 researchers at MIT reported a flaw in it and gave a corrected proof.

Random boards have a more practical drawback: some can’t be finished by logic, and the game ends on a coin flip. One answer is a no-guess board. Simon Tatham’s puzzle collection includes a minesweeper called Mines that by default places its mines so that you never need to guess, and many newer versions offer the same promise.

How LarkSpark plays it

Minesweeper Race takes the classic rules and changes the setting. There is one field a day, 20×20 with 60 mines, and everyone gets the same one. That is about the same share of mines as the classic beginner and intermediate boards, on a field larger than either. The clock is the score, as it has been since 1990, and the full details are in the rules.

Your first square is always safe, and tapping an opened number that already touches its full count of flags opens the rest of its neighbors, which is the chord that speed players rely on. The daily field is generated at random and is not a no-guess board, so once in a while you will have to take a chance. The solving tips cover how to put that moment off, and how to choose when it comes.

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