Microsoft Solitaire Inducted into World Video Game Hall of Fame | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft Solitaire Inducted into World Video Game Hall of Fame

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132 pointsYuval_Halevi50 comments

The artwork on the cards was drawn by Susan Kare, a legend in the industry starting with her work on the original Macintosh.

https://www.aiga.org/medalist-susan-kare

You can buy a set of playing cards with her original Solitaire art on the backs.

https://www.areaware.com/products/solitaire-cards?variant=14...

Oh man those cards are awesome!

Yeah, I was really tempted to get it as a gift. Pity the EU version is much more expensive, for some reason.

After shipping they cost $22 USD - that's mental for a deck of playing cards.

It's almost $40 for my EU country!

Yeah, they look like these ones released back on 2012: http://www.evan-roth.com/work/solitaire-exe/

I'd heard of Susan Kare due to her work on the Mac icons but wasn't aware of this. Great fact!

Getting DNS errors for areaware.com

In Conversation With Susan Kare: On Windows 3.0 Solitaire, Iconography, and Nostalgia https://web.archive.org/web/20180620074155/http://thisisstor...

I wish Microsoft hadn't ruined solitaire. It's now "Microsoft Solitaire Collection" with a whole online component and it's crippled if you're using it without an internet connection. It also drains the battery like nothing else. Sometimes you just want to kill some time on a plane without having to buy the overpriced crappy wifi!

So you need a book then?

Actually, a pack of playing cards, but that's a weird response to a common complaint here, which is big companies sunsetting user loved stuff for no visibly valid reason, besides IAP.

People being condescending about books needs to stop. I'll just say it: only reading certain non-fiction has any real intellectual or health value over meditation, a walk, reading an article, etc. The rest is just entertainment and relaxation, same as everything else.

I presume you haven't read any great novelists (Dostoyevski, Tolstoy, Solzhenitsyn etc.) yet.

I think you need to meet those in the right state of mind and circumstances. Some of them go deep into the human condition and our innermost beings, and if you haven't been close to that specific part you might not get it. Then they are just somewhat boring entertainment.

(generic you)

I presume you haven't meditated yet.

I think that's a little too euphoric, friend.

True, these were pretty much the reasons I ended up giving up on the collection. Luckily it turns out you can get older version of the Solitaire running on Win10 too, see for example: https://www.groovypost.com/howto/install-windows-7-classic-g...

The Pysol Fan Club Edition is available and good.

You should look at https://pysolfc.sourceforge.io/ . It is open source, and besides the classic Klondike solitaire, also has over 1000 other solitaire games. And it definitely will be a lot more energy efficient, too.

Awesome been wanting to fix up my dad with a Linux desktop at some point and Solitaire and Ping Pong from XP were games he played too. Gotta find Ping Pong next.

On Linux, the other solitaire program worth looking at is KPatience. It only has 12 types of solitaire, but has a pretty nice interface. It's probably worth it installing both PysolFC and KPatience.

There is a Mahjong variant that I found when I put Mint on my mother's computer. Both of my parents are now addicted to it.

except for the fact it's pretty tricky to make a linux laptop energy efficient.

It appears to have a Windows installer as well.

I wonder if this has a solitaire game that was in some random CD of various games I had way back when.

I believe it was called Thieves and Kings, but essentially, you had a 4x4 grid and your stack of cards. Jacks go in slots in the 2 center top and center bottom slots. Queens go in the 2 center left and center right slots, and Kings go in the corners. At this point, you flip a card one by one and fill up slots. Non-Jacks/Queens/Kings you try to get into the center 2x2 square as they're unimportant, but in time, you're having to judicially place cards into Jack/Queen/King slots in the hope you won't draw one of those and bust because their slot is occupied. After the 4x4 grid is filled, you then pair up non-Jacks/Queens/Kings by pairs that add to 10 (2+8, A+9, 5+5, etc.) and then repeat the process until you have the outer frame filled with Jacks/Queens/Kings.

It doesn't seem like that particular game is included, unless it's under some other name.

They might have credited the intern:

https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/3zfadv/til_t...

They might even credit Wes Cherry by name, and not just as "the intern"

Very disappointing, clearly they used the wrong deck back, it was all about that palm tree with the sun that had the easter egg smiley face. ;-)

The robots were the best! They were animated!

I was always fond of the castle at night back. The backs were pretty awesome though.

The win screen with the jumping cards is my main memory of the game to be honest :) pretty sure that's been parodied in movies as well.

For anyone who needs a little dose of that https://mrdoob.com/lab/javascript/effects/solitaire/

"Microsoft Solitaire has likely been installed on more than a million devices."

Probably billion, not million.

Correct. They say a billion later on in the article. That's a typo

It's likely been installed on more than a million devices too.

Even on more than a dozen devices when you think about it.

At least two!

"Microsoft Solitaire has likely been installed on more than one device."

An optimal implementation of Dijkstra's algorithm i O(nⁿ) in the number of vertices.

Just like Doom as well

I once put a red card on a red playing MS "solitaire" (ie patience). It was either Win98 or XP. That was a wtf moment, like how could they get _that_ wrong. Would have loved to have known what was going on there.

Edit: I misremembered, it was black on black; on WinXP. I have an image, but of course it doesn't prove anything as it could easily have been photoshopped.

Did you have ECC memory? Might have been a flipped bit induced by a cosmic ray...

Yes, non-ECC. The possibility of that depends on the internal format used for cards, I guess if it were a binary format then a environmentally flipped bit is a possibility?

I still remember the blue deck (the one showed in the article) had black birds who flap their wings. Nostalgic!

I remember them as bats! Haven't checked though.

That was the spooky castle deck complete with flapping bats. My favorite theme.

On the iPhone, my favorite version of FreeCell solitaire is Solitaire City on the App Store. It supports the standard rules, many optional forms/games, lets you play head to head with friends, accepts the standard game number initialization “seeds” if you want to work on a particular game, etc.

It’s the perfect game to pass a few minutes when stuck in a line/queue.

In my country, the Gamos' “Lines” game was a strong contender for mass killing of office drones' time―if not the top butcher. It held strong from '92 until around 2000.

(Known also as “Five or more” in Gnome games.)

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