14 DAY TRIAL // Solitaire is undoubtedly the most famous Windows game ever, and Microsoft’s now having a really hard time creating something that’s at least as addictive and time-wasting as the popular card game.
But as far as Solitaire is concerned, few people actually know how the title was created and how it ended up becoming the top Windows game to date.
Wes Cherry is the name of the summer intern at Microsoft who created the game in 1988 before it was eventually included in Windows 3.0.
But the way he ended up describing how he built the game is unexpected, to say the least.
The IT guy now makes apple cider
A post on reddit in the /r/TIL sub (via BI) reveals that the Solitaire creator has never made any money out of the game, so an army of redditors started searching for him online. It turned out that Wes Cherry owns Dragons Head Cider, a company that produces apple cider, and when the reddit post went viral and everyone accessed the official website, the server crashed.
Someone contacted him on Facebook to tell him that he must join reddit to tell everyone more about Solitaire and the way it landed in Windows.
“I wrote it for Windows 2.1 in my own time while an intern at Microsoft during the summer of 1988. I had played a similar solitaire game on the Mac instead of studying for finals at college and wanted a version for myself on Windows. At the time there was an internal ‘company within a company’ called Bogus software. It was really just a server where bunch of guys having fun hacking Windows to learn about the API tossed their games,” Wes Cherry explained.
“A program manager on the Windows team saw it and decided to include it in Windows 3.0. It was made clear that they wouldn't pay me other than supplying me with an IBM XT to fix some bugs during the school year - I was perfectly fine with it and I am to this day.”
In case you’re wondering, he continued working for Microsoft, eventually in the Excel team, but in the meantime, he also created a second game called Pipe Dream. Despite the fact that the game was less popular than Solitaire, he actually made some money out of it in the form of Microsoft stock that he decided to sell for a few thousand dollars at the time.