Where Our Favorite Games Came From
The stories behind five classic games: patience in old Europe, solitaire on Windows, Mahjong on a 1980s computer, and Sudoku and word search in America.
Sunroom Games · Updated
Some of these games are older than the United States. Others were invented on university computers in the years when most people had never touched one. Here are the stories behind the five games on Sunroom Games — including a few surprises.
Solitaire: a game for one, from the 1700s
Card games for a single player have been around for at least 250 years. They first appear in print in German books of card games from the late 1700s, and the card-game historian David Parlett has traced them back even further, to a biography that has a German composer playing one in the 1750s.
In Britain the games became known as patience — a fitting name — while Americans came to call them solitaire. By the second half of the 1800s they were a popular parlor pastime, and books of patience games were being published to meet the demand. One of the best known, Lady Adelaide Cadogan's Illustrated Games of Patience, first appeared around 1870 and was soon reprinted.
Why "Klondike"?
The game most of us simply call solitaire is properly named Klondike. Nobody knows for certain where the name came from, but it very probably refers to the Klondike Gold Rush in Canada's Yukon in the late 1890s, when tens of thousands of prospectors headed north to seek their fortune. The rules first appeared in print in 1907, in a book of Hoyle's Games, under the name "Seven-Card Klondike." Within a few years, "Klondike" on its own had come to mean the game we know today.
The game that taught the world to use a mouse
Klondike's biggest moment came in 1990, when Microsoft included it with Windows 3.0. The program had been written in 1988 by Wes Cherry, then an intern at Microsoft, and the cards were designed by Susan Kare, the artist behind many of the original Apple Macintosh icons.
Solitaire wasn't included just for fun. Many people were using a computer mouse for the first time, and dragging cards from pile to pile was a painless way to practice pointing, clicking and the then-new idea of drag and drop. It worked: for a great many people, Solitaire was the first thing they ever did with a mouse. In 2019 it was inducted into the World Video Game Hall of Fame at The Strong museum in Rochester, New York.
FreeCell: from a university computer to every desktop
FreeCell has a much shorter history. In 1978, Paul Alfille, then a medical student at the University of Illinois, adapted an older game called Baker's Game for PLATO, an early educational computer system at the university. His key change was to build the columns in alternating colors, as in Klondike, rather than by suit.
FreeCell reached a wide audience when Jim Horne wrote a version for Microsoft. It first appeared in a Microsoft Entertainment Pack in the early 1990s and was later included with Windows 95, which put it on computers in homes and offices around the world.
Horne's version numbered its deals from 1 to 32,000, which led to one of the first great volunteer projects of the internet age. Between 1994 and 1995, more than a hundred people, coordinated by Dave Ring as the Internet FreeCell Project, set out to solve every deal. They solved all of them but one: deal #11982, which turned out to be impossible. Our FreeCell uses the same numbering, so game #11982 here is that very deal.
Mahjong solitaire: old tiles, new game
The tiles are old. The four-player game of mahjong took shape in China in the 1800s and became a craze in America in the 1920s, when sets and rule books sold in huge numbers.
The solitaire game that uses those tiles is much younger. It was created in 1981 by Brodie Lockard, who wrote a game called Mah-Jongg for the same PLATO computer system where FreeCell had been born. In 1986 the video game company Activision released its own version, Shanghai, which made the game famous, and in 1990 Microsoft included a version called Taipei in its first Entertainment Pack.
The classic pile of 144 tiles is known as the Turtle, because its outline looks a little like one. It's the layout you'll find on our Mahjong page, alongside a taller Tower layout we designed to fit a phone held upright.
Sudoku: American invention, Japanese name
Sudoku sounds Japanese, and the name is, but the puzzle was invented in America. It first appeared in May 1979 in Dell Pencil Puzzles and Word Games, a puzzle magazine, under the name "Number Place." Its creator, Howard Garns, wasn't even credited at the time.
In 1984 the Japanese puzzle publisher Nikoli began printing the puzzles under a long name meaning roughly "the digits must be single," which was soon shortened to Sudoku. Nikoli's editors favored puzzles with a single solution and a pleasing, symmetrical pattern of starting numbers, a tradition many puzzle makers still follow.
The puzzle came back to the English-speaking world thanks to Wayne Gould, who had come across Sudoku in Japan and wrote a computer program to create them. After his puzzles appeared in a small New Hampshire newspaper, The Times of London launched a daily Sudoku on 12 November 2004. Within months, Sudoku was in newspapers everywhere.
Mathematicians have taken the puzzle seriously too. In 2012 a team announced proof that a Sudoku needs at least 17 starting numbers to have only one solution — after a computer search that took millions of hours of processing time.
Word search: a puzzle from Oklahoma
The word search is usually credited to Norman E. Gibat, who published one in the Selenby Digest, a local publication in Norman, Oklahoma, on March 1, 1968. Similar puzzles may have existed earlier — in Spanish the puzzle is called sopa de letras, or "letter soup" — but Gibat's is the one usually named as the first, and word searches soon spread to newspapers and puzzle books across the country.
They have been a favorite ever since, in classrooms, activity rooms and at kitchen tables. Ours keep to the gentlest form of the puzzle: every word runs across, down or diagonally downward, never backwards. If you'd like to try one on paper, our printable word searches are free to print and share.
Old games, new screens
What these games have in common is how little they need: a deck of cards, a set of tiles, a grid of numbers or letters, and a quiet half hour. That's why they've lasted. We've tried to keep that spirit on Sunroom Games — large, clear cards and letters, no timers, and nothing to sign up for.