Why every Windows PC shipped with Solitaire

The short answer: it was a mouse tutorial

In 1990 the mouse was not obvious. Businesses ran DOS, staff navigated by typing commands, and the pointer was a strange new peripheral that people gripped like a hand grenade. Microsoft was betting the company on a graphical interface, and a graphical interface is useless if nobody can pick a thing up and put it down somewhere else.

Klondike solves that teaching problem almost perfectly. Every single action in the game is a precise click or a drag from one small target to another, the feedback is instant, the penalty for a fumbled drag is zero, and people will happily repeat the motion for an hour because they want to, not because a manual told them to. By the time you have cleared one board you have performed a few hundred successful drag-and-drop operations without once thinking of it as practice.

Klondike was already old

The game itself predates the computer by a long way. Single-player card games show up in European books from the late 1700s, and by the Victorian era collections of them were a fixture of the parlour — the British called the whole family patience, which is a fair description of the experience. Klondike is one specific member of that family: seven columns, four foundations built ace to king, one stubborn stock pile.

The name most likely comes from the Klondike gold rush of the 1890s, the prospector's version of a game you play alone with long odds and a lot of digging. The rules were common property, nobody owned them, and that mattered enough in 1990: Microsoft could ship Klondike without licensing anything from anyone.

1990: an intern, a deck of cards, and Windows 3.0

The version that conquered the world was written by Wes Cherry, then an intern at Microsoft. He built it largely as a personal project; it was picked up and shipped with Windows 3.0. The card faces — the ones a generation can still picture exactly, right down to the winking king — were drawn by Susan Kare, the designer behind much of the original Macintosh icon set.

Cherry received no royalties. By his own account he also wrote a boss key that would hide the game instantly, and was told to take it out before release, which tells you Microsoft understood perfectly well what it was about to turn loose on the working world. It went out anyway, on every copy, and the win animation — cards cascading down the screen and bouncing off the bottom — became one of the most recognisable pieces of motion in consumer software.

The rest of the box was a curriculum too

Solitaire was not alone. Minesweeper, which arrived with Windows 3.1, drills the two things Klondike does not: clicking accurately on small targets, and discovering that the right mouse button does something different from the left. Hearts, bundled with Windows for Workgroups, quietly demonstrated that the machine on your desk could play a card game against three other machines down the hall — a networking demo you could beat.

FreeCell has the strangest job of the lot. It shipped in the Win32s add-on and then in Windows 95, and it doubled as a test that the new 32-bit subsystem was actually installed and working correctly. If FreeCell ran, the plumbing underneath it ran. An entire generation of technical support advice boiled down to asking people to open a card game.

The game that ate the office

The lesson worked far too well. Through the 1990s Solitaire became the standard illustration of workplace time-wasting, the subject of memos, monitoring software and endless management hand-wringing about productivity lost to a deck of digital cards. Some IT departments deleted the file from every machine in the building.

The most famous casualty came in 2006, when a New York City employee was fired after Mayor Michael Bloomberg spotted Solitaire on his screen during a walk through the office. The bet paid off for Microsoft either way: a piece of software people hide from their boss is a piece of software people genuinely want.

Removed, then reinstated

Windows 8 broke the streak in 2012. The built-in card games were cut from the default install and replaced by a Store download, and the reaction made it clear that after twenty-two years people had stopped thinking of Solitaire as a bundled extra and started thinking of it as part of the machine. It came back preinstalled in Windows 10 as the Microsoft Solitaire Collection — this time with adverts and an optional subscription to remove them.

In 2019 Microsoft Solitaire was inducted into the World Video Game Hall of Fame, alongside titles with rather larger development budgets. Not bad for a project an intern wrote for free to teach people how to hold a mouse.

Where to play Klondike now

The irony of the modern version is that you no longer need Windows at all — a browser tab does the job, which is roughly where the whole story was always heading. Solitaire Blast on crokocat is straight Klondike on green felt: seven columns, four aces to find, draw-1 or draw-3, unlimited undo and free hints, with no download and no sign-up.

It also fixes the oldest complaint in the game. Every deal is checked by a solver before you see it, so a winning line always exists — including the deal of the day, one shared layout that changes at midnight and builds a streak if you keep clearing it. If you prefer the honest lottery of a shuffled deck, winnable deals can be switched off in the menu. The mouse lesson is optional now; the game is still exactly as stubborn as it was in 1990.

Solitaire BlastKlondike with a deal of the dayPlay now

Frequently asked questions

Guides & tips

• Klondike solitaire strategy: how to win more games
• Relaxing browser games: calm board, card and logic games
• 21 Match tips: how to clear every board in exactly 21

Play it here

• Solitaire Blast — Klondike with a deal of the day