A history of office games
People have played games at their desks for as long as there have been desks with computers on them. Here is why, what the research says about short breaks, and where each of the games on this site comes from.
Games that came with the computer
The first version of Windows, released in 1985, came with one game: Reversi, the board game also sold as Othello. Windows 3.0 added Solitaire in 1990, and Microsoft has been open about why. In 1994 Libby Duzan, its lead product manager for entertainment, told The Washington Post that Solitaire went into Windows “to soothe people intimidated by the operating system”: it gave them something familiar to do while it taught them to use a mouse. When the game turned 30, The Verge told the same story: moving cards from pile to pile taught the basics of drag and drop.
Minesweeper is often said to have been added to train left- and right-clicking. We could not find Microsoft saying so. The same 1994 article gives a plainer reason: when Windows 3.1 shipped in 1992, Minesweeper was the favourite game of the people building it, Bill Gates included. Flagging mines with the right button gave players practice anyway, but as a design goal the training story looks like later folklore. Hearts, which arrived with Windows for Workgroups in 1992, has a better claim: it let colleagues play each other across the office network, as a showcase for Microsoft’s NetDDE networking. So the record supports a modest version of the idea that games were there to teach: Solitaire for the mouse, Hearts for the network.
The boss is watching
Managers noticed. The 1994 Post article reported that some companies, Boeing among them, routinely removed Solitaire and Minesweeper from new PCs or asked Microsoft to ship Windows without them, and that PC Magazine had banned game-playing in office hours. By Windows 7 the business editions, Professional and Enterprise, came with the games switched off unless someone turned them on.
Players had their own answer: the boss key, a keystroke that swaps the game for something that looks like work. The same article describes a PC version of Tetris in which pressing Escape brought up a fake spreadsheet resembling Lotus 1-2-3. Wes Cherry, who wrote Windows Solitaire, had given it a boss mode with a fake spreadsheet too, but Microsoft had him take it out before release.
The best-known casualty came in 2006, when New York’s mayor, Michael Bloomberg, saw Solitaire on a clerk’s screen in the city’s Albany office. The man was fired after six years in the job, without warning or severance. “The workplace is not an appropriate place for games,” the mayor told reporters.
What research says about short breaks
The evidence is kinder to short breaks than the mayor was, though less dramatic than headlines suggest. A 2022 meta-analysis by Albulescu and colleagues pooled 22 study samples on micro-breaks, pauses of up to ten minutes. Breaks gave small but reliable gains in vigour and small drops in fatigue. Their effect on overall performance was not statistically significant; performance improved only on less demanding tasks, and the authors suggest that recovering from very draining work may need more than ten minutes.
At the University of Melbourne, Brent Coker surveyed office workers about browsing the web for fun at work. In his account, those who did so in moderation, under about a fifth of their working time, were more productive than those who didn’t, by about 9 per cent according to the university’s 2009 announcement; the study was later published in 2011. It is one survey, and it shows an association rather than proof that browsing caused the difference. Coker’s explanation is that a brief, unobtrusive break restores attention.
Letting a problem sit
Psychologists call setting a problem aside before returning to it incubation. A 2009 meta-analysis by Sio and Ormerod found a positive effect overall, largest for open-ended tasks that ask for many possible answers. Filling the pause with demanding work helped less, and for some word puzzles a light task did better than simply resting.
Baird and colleagues (2012) tested the idea that a wandering mind does the work. People who spent the break on an easy task came back with more ideas for problems they had already seen than those who did a hard task, rested or had no break, and the gain went with more mind-wandering rather than more deliberate thought about the problem. That is close to what many people mean by a game on a break: something light for the hands while the real task turns over in the background. But the tasks were lab exercises such as listing unusual uses for everyday objects, not office work, and repeat studies have been mixed: a 2022 review called the evidence small and inconclusive.
A break, not an escape
None of this makes every game at work a good idea. Piers Steel’s 2007 meta-analysis of procrastination found that people put off tasks they find unpleasant, and that impulsiveness, distractibility and weak self-control are among its strongest predictors. A game played to avoid a dreaded job is procrastination with better graphics. The difference is whether you go back.
That is the idea behind this site: games that take a few minutes, end on their own and leave you at your desk again, a little fresher. Play one, then return to the thing you were doing.
Sources
- Joel Garreau, “Office Minefield”, The Washington Post (9 March 1994), archived copy
- Tom Warren, “Microsoft Solitaire turns 30 years old today”, The Verge (2020)
- “List of games included with Windows”, Wikipedia
- “Microsoft Hearts”, Wikipedia (citing PC Magazine, June 1993)
- Microsoft Community answer on games in Windows 7 Professional (2010)
- “NYC mayor fires man playing solitaire at work”, Reuters via NBC News (2006)
- Margaret Kane, “A costly game of solitaire”, CNET (2006)
- Albulescu et al., “Give me a break!”, PLOS ONE (2022)
- “Study: ‘Leisure browsing’ increases productivity”, Nextgov (2009)
- Coker, “Freedom to surf”, New Technology, Work and Employment (2011)
- Sio & Ormerod, “Does incubation enhance problem solving?”, Psychological Bulletin (2009)
- Baird et al., “Inspired by distraction”, Psychological Science (2012)
- Teng & Lien, “Propensity or diversity?”, PLOS ONE (2022)
- Steel, “The nature of procrastination”, Psychological Bulletin (2007)
Where our games come from
Every classic the games on this site pay tribute to, oldest first. Our versions are our own; the originals belong to their makers.
- 1879
15 Puzzle
Noyes Palmer Chapman, a postmaster in Canastota, New York, is credited with devising the sliding puzzle in the 1870s. Copies reached Hartford, where students at the American School for the Deaf began making them, and by December 1879 they were on sale there and in Boston; in 1880 the puzzle became a craze across America and then Europe. Sam Loyd later claimed to have invented it and offered a prize for swapping the 14 and 15, which Johnson and Story had shown in 1879 to be impossible.
- 1971
Mastermind
Mordecai Meirowitz, an Israeli telecommunications expert, invented the game in 1970, and after big toy companies turned it down, Invicta Plastics of Leicester restyled it and released it as Master Mind. It drew on Bulls and Cows, an older pencil-and-paper game with digits that had already run on Cambridge’s Titan computer as MOO. In 1977 Donald Knuth showed that any four-peg, six-colour code can be cracked in five guesses, and the game is still sold today.
- 1976
Blockade
Lane Hauck turned an experiment, a moving point that could never cross its own trail, into Blockade for Gremlin. Two players steered lines that left walls behind them, and the first to crash lost the round. Atari and others released their own versions before Gremlin could ship, and home computers later made it a single snake that grows as it eats. Taneli Armanto’s Snake for the Nokia 6110 in 1998 put the idea on millions of phones.
- 1976
Breakout
Nolan Bushnell and Steve Bristow conceived Breakout as Pong for one player: bounce a ball off a paddle into eight rows of bricks. Steve Wozniak built the prototype with help from Steve Jobs, and the black-and-white screen got its coloured rows from strips of translucent film over the glass. Super Breakout added more balls in 1978, and Taito’s Arkanoid (1986) led a long line of brick-breakers.
- 1978
FreeCell
Paul Alfille, a medical student at the University of Illinois, wrote FreeCell in 1978 for the PLATO educational computer system, changing the older Baker’s Game so that columns build in alternating colours. Jim Horne, who had played it on PLATO, released an MS-DOS version in 1988, joined Microsoft and ported it to Windows. It appeared in Microsoft Entertainment Pack 2 and came with every version of Windows from 1995; of its 32,000 numbered deals, only #11982 cannot be won.
- 1978
Space Invaders
Tomohiro Nishikado designed Space Invaders at Taito, building custom hardware to march rows of aliens down towards a single laser cannon. The processor drew the screen faster as aliens were destroyed, so the march sped up; rather than fix it, Nishikado kept it as part of the game. It set the template for the fixed shooter, became a worldwide success, and its 1980 Atari 2600 port quadrupled the console’s sales.
- 1979
Asteroids
Lyle Rains and Ed Logg designed Asteroids at Atari, taking the drifting, thrust-driven ship of Spacewar! and drawing everything in sharp lines on a vector display. The screen wraps at every edge, so a rock that leaves one side returns on the other, and flying saucers shoot back. It became Atari’s best-selling arcade game, with more than 70,000 cabinets, and the Atari 2600 version sold over three million copies.
- 1979
Sudoku
The modern puzzle first appeared in 1979 as Number Place in Dell puzzle magazines, most likely set by Howard Garns, a retired architect from Indiana. Nikoli introduced it in Japan in 1984, and its president Maki Kaji shortened the long Japanese title to sudoku, roughly “single digit”. In 2004 newspapers outside Japan took it up, The Times among them, using puzzles from a computer program by Wayne Gould, and the craze spread from there.
- 1980
Pac-Man
Toru Iwatani led a Namco team that wanted a game women would enjoy as much as men, with cute, colourful characters instead of war or sport. It came out in Japan as Puck Man, from “paku paku”, the sound of gobbling, and became Pac-Man abroad. Four ghosts chase the hero round a maze until a power pellet turns the tables. Sequels, cartoons and a hit single followed, and the character became Namco’s mascot.
- 1981
Blitz
Simon Taylor based Blitz for the VIC-20 on Atari’s 1977 arcade game Canyon Bomber, swapping its canyon of rocks for a city of skyscrapers and making the plane drop lower on every pass. He first sold it himself as Vic New York before Commodore published it as Blitz, and Mastertronic later reissued it as New York Blitz. The city setting was copied by many later clones, among them Jeff Minter’s 1982 version for the ZX Spectrum. This tribute keeps the falling plane and swaps the city for a forest fire and the bombs for water.
- 1981
Chef
Chef came out in Nintendo’s Game & Watch Wide Screen series in September 1981. A cook flips a sausage, a fish and other food into the air with a pan, a cat pokes at the food to hold it in place, and anything dropped is stolen by a mouse. The Soviet Elektronika line made its own version, the IM-04 “Merry Cook”, in 1989, and Nintendo later revived Chef in Game & Watch Gallery collections and on DSiWare.
- 1981
Egg
Egg joined Nintendo’s Game & Watch Wide Screen series in October 1981: a wolf outside a hen house catches eggs rolling down four ramps, and a miss counts only half while a hen is showing. Days earlier Nintendo had released the same game as Mickey Mouse. The Soviet Elektronika line copied it from the mid-1980s as the IM-02 “Nu, pogodi!”, with the wolf and the hare from the cartoon, and it became that line’s best-known handheld.
- 1981
Octopus
Octopus was released in Nintendo’s Game & Watch Wide Screen series in July 1981, and sold in Britain as Mysteries of the Sea. Divers jump off a boat to bring up treasure from a sunken ship while a giant octopus reaches out with its tentacles. In 1986 the Soviet Elektronika line made its own version, the IM-03 “Mysteries of the Ocean”. Nintendo later brought it back in Game & Watch Gallery collections and as Octopus Dance in Nintendo Land.
- 1982
Paratrooper
Greg Kuperberg wrote Paratrooper for Orion Software as a self-booting disk for the IBM PC, basing it on Mark Allen’s 1981 Apple II game Sabotage. Every shell cost a point, and if four paratroopers landed on one side of the gun they climbed up and blew it apart. PC Magazine found it well made but quick to lose its appeal, and in 1992 Software Creations remade it for MS-DOS as Night Raid.
- 1982
Sokoban
Hiroyuki Imabayashi wrote Sokoban, Japanese for “warehouse keeper”, as a hobby in 1981 on an NEC PC-8001, with text graphics and five levels. His new company, Thinking Rabbit, released an expanded twenty-level version in 1982, and sequels and licensed versions followed on Japanese computers and consoles; Spectrum HoloByte brought it to the United States as Soko-Ban in 1988. Falcon has held the rights since 2001, and the box-pushing puzzle is studied in computational complexity and artificial intelligence research.
- 1983
Digger
Rob Sleath wrote Digger for Windmill Software, a small Toronto company, as a self-booting disk for the IBM PC. It borrowed from the arcade games Mr. Do! and Dig Dug and played “Popcorn” through the PC speaker. Because it needed a genuine CGA card and was timed for the original PC, it would not run properly on later machines. In 1998 Andrew Jenner reverse-engineered it as Digger Remastered, and a Digger HD remake reached the PlayStation 3 in 2009.
- 1984
Boulder Dash
Chris Gray had written a rough BASIC game modelled on the arcade game The Pit. Peter Liepa took the idea, expanded it in Forth and then rewrote it in 6502 assembly, and First Star Software published it for Atari 8-bit computers. Its name is a pun on “balderdash”. Ports, arcade versions and many sequels followed, and the game gave rise to the rocks-and-diamonds genre. BBG Entertainment has owned the rights since 2017.
- 1984
Sopwith
David L. Clark wrote Sopwith at the Canadian firm BMB Compuscience to demonstrate Imaginet, the company’s networking system. Multiplayer needed BMB’s hardware, but the single-player game of bombing buildings in a CGA biplane spread far and wide. An ox on the ground was an in-joke about a BMB employee nicknamed Ox. A sequel followed in 1985, and after Clark released the source code in 2000, fans kept the game alive in open-source ports such as SDL Sopwith.
- 1984
Tetris
Alexey Pajitnov, a researcher at the Dorodnitsyn Computing Center in Moscow, wrote Tetris in his spare time on an Elektronika 60, a computer with no graphics, so the pieces were drawn with brackets. He cut the pentomino puzzles he loved down to the seven four-square tetrominoes and named the game after “tetra” and tennis. Copies spread on floppy disks before Western publishers released it in 1988, and the 1989 Game Boy version made it a worldwide hit.
- 1984
Xonix
Ilan Raab and Dani Katz, two Israeli programmers, wrote Xonix for DOS PCs. It took the idea of Taito’s 1981 arcade game Qix, fencing off parts of the playing field, and filled the open “sea” with bouncing balls that end your run if they touch your trail. The game spread widely on PCs in Israel and the former Soviet Union, and later versions such as AirXonix carried the name on.
- 1985
Chain Shot!
Kuniaki Moribe wrote Chain Shot! in 1985 for Fujitsu’s FM-8 and FM-7 home computers: click a group of touching blocks of one colour to remove it, and the rest fall and slide to close the gap. In 1992 Eiji Fukumoto ported it to Unix as SameGame, and versions for the NEC PC-9801, Windows 3.1 and the Macintosh followed. A 1994 Macintosh port became the basis of KSame and Same GNOME on Linux, and the game also spread under names such as Clickomania.
- 1986
Shanghai
Brodie Lockard, a Stanford student paralysed in a 1979 trampoline accident, wrote a tile-matching patience called Mah-Jongg on the PLATO network in 1981. Activision turned it into Shanghai in 1986, with Lockard programming the Macintosh version, and it was ported to many home computers and, by Sunsoft, to Japanese arcades. Its stacked starting layout, now called the turtle, became the standard, and Microsoft carried the idea into Windows as Taipei, Mahjong Titans and Microsoft Mahjong.
- 1987
Nonogram
In 1987 the Japanese graphics editor Non Ishida won a competition in Tokyo with pictures made from lit and unlit skyscraper windows, which led her to a grid puzzle; the puzzle writer Tetsuya Nishio came up with the same idea independently. The British collector James Dalgety named them nonograms, and The Sunday Telegraph printed them weekly from 1990. Nintendo later made them a video game series under the name Picross.
- 1989
TriPeaks
Robert Hogue devised TriPeaks in 1989, taking the one-up-or-one-down rule of Golf and dealing the cards into three overlapping peaks whose hidden cards turn over as they are uncovered. His original scoring rewarded long runs and let a player quit a hand early to limit losses. The game shipped in Microsoft’s Windows Entertainment Pack 3 and later became part of Microsoft Solitaire Collection; Hogue meant others to invent new layouts and scoring on the same principle.
- 1990
Microsoft Solitaire
Wes Cherry wrote Solitaire as a Microsoft intern in the summer of 1988, and Susan Kare designed the cards. Windows 3.0 included it in 1990, partly to teach people new to graphical interfaces to drag and drop with a mouse. Cherry’s version had a boss key that switched to a fake spreadsheet, but he was asked to take it out. Microsoft Solitaire Collection replaced it in 2012, and the original entered the World Video Game Hall of Fame in 2019.
- 1990
Minesweeper
Robert Donner and Curt Johnson wrote Minesweeper at Microsoft, and it first appeared in Microsoft Entertainment Pack 1 in 1990. Windows 3.1 included it in 1992 in place of Reversi, and it shipped with every Windows release until Windows 8 dropped it in 2012 for a new, ad-supported version in the Microsoft Store. Earlier mine-finding games existed, such as Ian Andrew’s Mined-Out for the ZX Spectrum in 1983.
- 1991
Gorillas
Gorillas came with MS-DOS 5.0 as GORILLA.BAS, one of the sample programs written to show off the new QBasic language, alongside Nibbles. Two gorillas on a city skyline took turns throwing explosive bananas, with each player typing an angle and a velocity and allowing for the wind. Because it shipped as source code, anyone could read it and change it, and it has since been ported and remade many times.
- 1992
Color Lines
Oleg Demin created Color Lines for the Russian studio Gamos, with graphics by Gennady Denisov and Igor Ivkin. Because Demin worked at Moscow City Hall, the first version credited his wife, Olga Demina. Copied freely, it had millions of players in Russian offices by 1996, while Gamos sold only about 300 legal copies. Namco bought rights to the game that year, and clones such as GNOME’s Five or More still follow its rules.
- 1994
Puzzle Bobble
Taito’s Puzzle Bobble, released abroad as Bust-a-Move, is a spin-off of its 1986 arcade game Bubble Bobble and borrows that game’s characters. A pointer at the bottom fires coloured bubbles upwards; three or more of a colour pop, and any bubbles hanging from them fall. Every few shots the ceiling drops a little closer. Its cute style and simple rules made it an arcade success, and many sequels and home versions followed; later bubble shooters kept its rules.
- 1995
Lights Out
Tiger Electronics released Lights Out in 1995: a 5 × 5 grid of lit buttons where pressing one toggles it and its neighbours, and the aim is to switch them all off in as few presses as possible. It followed Parker Brothers’ Merlin, which had a similar game on a 3 × 3 grid in the 1970s. The puzzle drew mathematicians’ attention, and in 1998 Marlow Anderson and Todd Feil used linear algebra to show that not every 5 × 5 pattern can be solved.
- 2003
Star Battle
Hans Eendebak created Star Battle for the 2003 World Puzzle Championship in the Netherlands: stars go in a grid so that every row, column and region holds the same number, and no two stars touch, even diagonally. Its roots reach back to the eight queens problem, posed by Max Bezzel in 1848. In May 2024 LinkedIn launched Queens, a daily one-star version with one queen per row, column and region, whose first puzzles came from the setter Thomas Snyder.
- 2004
KenKen
Tetsuya Miyamoto, a Japanese maths teacher, invented the puzzle in 2004 as a way to train the brain without instructions: fill a Latin square so that each outlined cage makes its target number with the given sum, difference, product or quotient. Gakken published his puzzle books in Japan, and the toy inventor Robert Fuhrer helped bring them to The Times, which began printing them in 2008. Puzzles without the trademark are often called Calcudoku or MathDoku.
- 2005
Planarity
John Tantalo wrote Planarity in Flash in 2005 at Case Western Reserve University, based on a concept by Mary Radcliffe of Western Michigan University. Each level starts from random straight lines: their crossing points become the dots, so every tangle is a planar graph that can be laid out with no crossings, and each level adds one more line. Its popularity inspired gPlanarity, a version by Xiph.org’s Chris Montgomery, and many “untangle” games since.
- 2010
Cut the Rope
Cut the Rope grew out of ZeptoLab’s first iPhone game, Parachute Ninja, whose rope controls confused testers; the twin brothers behind the studio kept the rope physics and built a new game around it. Players cut ropes to swing a sweet into the mouth of Om Nom, a small green monster, collecting three stars on the way. Released in October 2010 through the publisher Chillingo, it grew into a series that passed a billion downloads by 2018.
- 2013
Flappy Bird
Dong Nguyen, a developer in Vietnam, made Flappy Bird in a few days, reusing a bird from a cancelled game, and released it on iOS in May 2013. It went almost unnoticed until early 2014, when it became the most downloaded free game on the App Store and, by Nguyen’s account, earned about $50,000 a day from ads. He pulled it from the stores on 10 February 2014, saying it had become too addictive, and a wave of clones followed.
- 2014
1010!
1010! came from Gram Games, a small studio in Istanbul, in September 2014. Players drag Tetris-like shapes onto a 10 × 10 board and clear any row or column they fill; the co-founder Mehmet Ecevit called it “Tetris without gravity”. It passed 25 million downloads within a year, a sequel, 1010! World, followed in 2015, and Zynga bought Gram Games in 2018.
- 2014
2048
Gabriele Cirulli, a 19-year-old Italian web developer, wrote 2048 over a weekend to see whether he could build a game from scratch, and released it free and open source on 9 March 2014. It reworked 1024, itself a clone of the iOS puzzle Threes. More than four million people played it in its first week, apps followed in May, and countless variants appeared. Cirulli kept it free, saying he did not want to profit from a concept he had not invented.
- No firm date
Golf
Golf is a single-pack patience in which cards from seven face-up columns go onto one pile if they are one rank above or below its top card. Solitaire researcher Michael Keller finds it in Tarbart’s 1905 Games of Patience under the name One Foundation; the name Golf came later, from counting the cards left over like strokes, often across nine deals or “holes”. Microsoft included it in the first Windows Entertainment Pack in 1990, and TriPeaks is built on its rule.
- No firm date
Ice Hockey (Elektronika IM-10)
The Soviet Elektronika line of LCD handhelds was largely built on copies of Nintendo’s Game & Watch, and its best-known model, the IM-02 “Nu, pogodi!”, was a version of the 1981 game Egg. The IM-10 “Ice Hockey” kept that four-chute catching game and turned it into hockey, with a goalkeeper stopping pucks in place of a wolf catching eggs. It also appeared as one of the screens for the IM-26, an Elektronika handheld with swappable game displays.
- No firm date
Kakuro (Cross Sums)
Kakuro began in American puzzle magazines as Cross Sums, a name coined by Jacob E. Funk, a Canadian working for Dell Magazines: a crossword in which every run of digits must add up to its clue, with no digit repeated in a run. In Japan it became kasan kurosu, “addition cross”, shortened to Kakuro, and it was the most popular puzzle in the Japanese press until Sudoku overtook it in 1992. In Britain it first ran in The Guardian.
- No firm date
Pyramid
Pyramid is a patience in which pairs of uncovered cards adding up to 13 are removed from a triangle of 28 cards. Solitaire researcher Michael Keller traces the modern game to American books of the late 1920s, under names such as Elizabeth’s Solitaire and The Tower of Twenty-Eight, before Morehead and Mott-Smith’s 1949 collection made it a standard. Microsoft included a version called Tut’s Tomb in Windows Entertainment Pack 2 in 1991, and Microsoft Solitaire Collection later added it as Pyramid.
- No firm date
Spider
Spider is a two-pack patience whose inventor is unknown. W. Somerset Maugham mentions trying “the spider” in his 1930 travel book The Gentleman in the Parlour, and Albert Morehead and Geoffrey Mott-Smith’s 1949 Complete Book of Solitaire and Patience Games describes the ten-column deal still used today, naming Franklin D. Roosevelt as a devotee. Microsoft added Spider Solitaire to the Plus! 98 pack, then built it into Windows Me and XP with one-, two- and four-suit levels.
- No firm date
Yukon
Yukon is a single-pack relative of Klondike in which every card is dealt at the start and there is no stock. Its inventor is unknown; it appears in Albert Morehead and Geoffrey Mott-Smith’s 1949 Complete Book of Solitaire and Patience Games, which puts the chance of winning at one game in four. Any face-up card can be moved together with everything on top of it, in any order. Variants include Russian Solitaire, which builds by suit, and the related Alaska and Australian Patience.