When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Heres how it works.
It turns out that Bill Gates shared a love of Minesweeper with many other office workers.
His passion was referred to as an “addiction” by many.
Melinda French, who went on to marry Bill Gates, asked Microsoft employees to not tell the CEO about new Minesweeper records.
The tale comes courtesy ofArs Technica, which recently shared an excerpt of the bookMinesweeperby Kyle Orland.
you might preorder the book fromBoss Fight Books on Kickstarter.
Luckily for Microsoft, the company had many willing participants.
Melinda French, who went on to marry Bill Gates, asked Microsoft employees to not tell the CEO about new Minesweeper records.
As you might suspect, those “testers” were actually just people enjoying the game.
“Bill got addicted,” said Fitzgerald.
Is that good?'"
I wrote back to him, I go, Yeah, 10 seconds is really good.
The record for us right now I think is eight.
(I think that was me, embarrassingly.)
Gates played Minesweeper so much that the game was taken off his PC.
The CEO would then go into other people’s offices to venture to break the record.
In one instance, Gates set a then record for Minesweeper and invited Fitzgerald to verify it.
“This was early evening.
So we went over there, seven at night.
The hope was that the program would set a record that was unbeatable, which it did.
Gates seemed to take the antic in stride.
He responded, saying in jest, “My critical skills are being displaced by a computer.
This technology thing is going too far.
When machines can do things faster than people, how can we retain our human dignity?”
