By Online Solitaire Free Editorial Team · Editorial Standards
Microsoft's decision to ship Solitaire with Windows 3.0 in 1990 made it the most-played computer game ever — by accident. Here is the full story of how a card game taught the world how to use a mouse.
By any reasonable measure, Microsoft Solitaire is the most-played computer game in history. Hundreds of millions of people have played it across three decades, often during work hours, often without thinking of themselves as gamers at all. The story of how this happened is one of the great accidents of personal computing.
When Microsoft was developing Windows 3.0 in the late 1980s, the team needed to teach users a new way of interacting with computers: the mouse. Most office workers in 1990 had spent years using keyboard-only interfaces. Clicking, dragging, and dropping were unfamiliar gestures. Engineer Wes Cherry, then an intern at Microsoft, built a Klondike Solitaire program in his spare time. Microsoft's Susan Kare designed the iconic playing card faces.
Microsoft included the game in Windows 3.0, released in May 1990. The official reasoning was that Solitaire taught mouse skills painlessly. Dragging a card across the screen exercised exactly the gestures users needed to learn for spreadsheets, file management, and word processing. The game was framed as a tutorial as much as entertainment.
Office workers loved it. Within months, Solitaire was being played in cubicles around the world — often when the boss wasn't looking. The game spread alongside Windows itself, which became the dominant operating system of the 1990s. By 1995, Solitaire was preinstalled on the majority of personal computers on Earth. People who had never owned a video game system were playing dozens of hands per week.
Microsoft Solitaire was perfectly suited to office life. A game took five to fifteen minutes — long enough to be a real break, short enough to abandon if a manager walked by. It required no installation, no commitment, no learning curve for anyone who had ever played cards. The minimal interface meant it ran instantly on the slow PCs of the era. And critically, it looked enough like work that many users played without feeling guilty.
Throughout the 1990s, business publications regularly debated whether Solitaire was costing companies billions of dollars in lost productivity. Some surveys claimed Solitaire and FreeCell (added in Windows 3.1) were responsible for staggering amounts of wasted office time. Other researchers pointed out that the games served as legitimate mental breaks that improved productivity overall. The debate never resolved, but it cemented Solitaire's reputation as the unofficial mascot of office distraction.
FreeCell was added to Windows in 1991 and Spider Solitaire arrived with Windows ME in 2000. Each new variant brought new players. FreeCell appealed to those who wanted strategy without luck. Spider attracted players who wanted longer, more challenging sessions. By the early 2000s, Microsoft was effectively running a small solitaire game library inside its operating system.
The internet expanded solitaire's reach further. Free web-based solitaire sites appeared in the late 1990s. Players could now play without installing anything. Smartphones, starting around 2008, brought solitaire into pockets and onto trains and into waiting rooms. The game that started as a Windows accessory is now available on essentially every screen ever made.
In 2012, Microsoft made the controversial decision to remove Solitaire from the default Windows installation in Windows 8. It returned in Windows 10 as Microsoft Solitaire Collection — now featuring ads and a paid subscription tier. Many longtime players were unhappy with the change, and the move helped fuel the growth of free, ad-free solitaire sites on the open web.
Microsoft Solitaire is one of the most successful pieces of software ever shipped. It introduced more people to digital gaming than any other single program. It made an 18th-century European card game into a global daily ritual. And it did all of this almost as a side effect — the byproduct of an intern's project meant to teach people how to use a mouse.