![]() ![]() I felt very efficient having done this while I wasn’t even in the office.Thanks to teengirlsquad4, KINGvJAMES, Arsenic 17, PeeMcPee, SILVERsifDURFER, eNaRGe, Chrono Rhapsody, and neeker75 for their contributions to improve this solution! “So I set it there and then went off for a day of meetings, and four hours later it had won while I was gone. “If you ever cleared the entire board, it would bring up a high score window, and at that point the reset wouldn't work,” Ryan explained. To play “a gazillion times,” Ryan said he made use of a “super primitive” early Windows program called Macro Recorder, which could automatically click the corner of a fresh Minesweeper game, then immediately click the “New Game” button over and over again. “You’d just have to play like a gazillion times to do this.” “It dawned on me that if all the mines were clumped in the lower right-hand corner, it would clear the entire screen in one or zero seconds,” Ryan said. Rather than just keep the record a secret, though, Ryan eventually decided to use some early software automation to convince Bill that the Minesweeper record was forever out of reach. Melinda’s request foreshadowed fears of Minesweeper’s productivity-sucking potential from countless office managers in the years to come. Bill has a lot of important decisions to make, and this should not be taking up time!” Bill’s Minesweeper addiction took place about four years before their 1994 wedding, at a point where they were dating non-exclusively.Īs Ryan recalls, Melinda called Ryan into her office one day to ask for “a favor for the company… Please don't share with Bill advances in the Minesweeper record.” The attention Bill was paying to the game, she said, was “not a good thing. If that name sounds familiar, it’s probably because Melinda French is now known as Melinda Gates, Bill’s ex-wife and half the namesake of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. “Melinda was a level above me, but we in the same group ,” Ryan said. What hasn’t been reported previously, as far as I can tell, is the extreme interventions some key employees took in an attempt to break Gates of his habit. ![]() The broad outlines of Gates’ brief Minesweeper addiction have been widely reported in press accounts going back at least as far as a 1994 Washington Post article. ![]()
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