Over 500 million people have played Microsoft Solitaire since its 1990 release as an included game in the Windows 3.0 operating system. In 2019, it was inducted into the World Video Game Hall of Fame, marking it as one of the most influential video games of all time.
Since its inception, it’s been localized into 65 languages and played on every continent, including Antarctica. Though it doesn’t come pre-installed in Windows computers anymore, users continue to download and play it on computers, tablets and phones 35 years later.
USA TODAY’s Ariana Torrey recounts her experience as a millennial growing up playing Microsoft Solitaire and how she evolved alongside the game:
I was six-years-old when we got our first Windows PC.
Before Windows 95, games were things I played on my Super Nintendo, sometimes my Gameboy, rarely our family Macintosh.
But after being given my very own Windows login with a neon-colored icon as my profile picture, it only took me four clicks to find the “Games” folder hidden in the START menu of the Windows taskbar.
The games that came preinstalled on Windows 95 were FreeCell, Hearts, Minesweeper and Solitaire. The pickings were slim, but for a girl in the ’90s, it amounted to hours of entertainment, and later, an obsession with solitaire-based card games that spanned well into adulthood.
The Windows 95 version of Solitaire wasn’t like the one I had seen my Nana play, meticulously laying out cards one-by-one into neat stacks, moving each row gingerly by hand. This version sported bright pixel art decks that you could change at will, and a mesmerizing animation of the cards cascading down and bouncing whenever you won a game.
Originally included in Windows 3.0 in 1990, developers hoped Solitaire would help beginner computer users get familiar with the functionality of a mouse – a relatively new tool for people at the time. The computer did indeed make shuffling, ordering and restacking cards as simple as a single click. It also recorded your win percentages diligently, making it perfect ammo to hurl at your brother during arguments about who got to play next on the computer.
As I aged and we upgraded to Windows 98 and then 2000, the gaming landscape was shifting before me with the release of the PlayStation 2, which pushed graphic capabilities as we knew it to places we had only dreamed of before. But these tried-and-true Windows games remained largely untouched. Always preinstalled, they changed very little with the turn of the millennium.
They were simple.
Reliable.
Comforting.
It became second nature to click into Solitaire while waiting around for my mom to get off the landline phone so I could log onto AOL messenger, or when patiently watching jpegs load, lines by blurry line, on 56k dial up. Along with millions of other Americans, I played Solitaire in the moments I was procrastinating, reflecting, bored, overwhelmed or needing a break. It required no commitment. No CD-Roms. No beefy hardware.
Just your idle mind.
With the launch of Windows XP in 2001, a whole new set of Internet-connected games were built into the operating system. Now with the ability to face opponents online, they included Internet Backgammon, Internet Checkers, Internet Hearts, Internet Reversi and Internet Spades. My beloved solo games were still available too, along with a brand new Solitaire mode – Spider Solitaire.
All of the Internet games disappeared with later versions of Windows, but Spider Solitaire remained. It became a new staple in the pre-installed Windows zeitgeist for more than a decade, included with the four original games in the releases of Windows Vista in 2006 and Windows 7 in 2009.
This strong quintuple of games remained with me all throughout high school and college with every upgrade we made on our family PC, and later, on my college laptop. I still played regularly, getting more competitive in my pursuit of better streaks and win percentages. I wasn’t competing with anyone besides myself, but that is what I liked about it.
When Windows 10 released in 2015, I had already started my career, and the world had grown up along with me; We all had less idle time, more distractions, an entire internet full of content to consume at any given moment. Solitaire couldn’t compete with the dopamine hits of doom-scrolling social media or binge-watching Breaking Bad for the third time. Plus, there were just so many games now. Hundreds. Thousands. Some so addicting people were spending real life money on virtual, sparkly gems for games they would abandon six months later.
Microsoft knew this. They had launched an entire empire of gaming with the Xbox console, and their operating system followed suit. Instead of coming pre-installed, Solitaire was now offered as an app you had to download from the Windows Store on your phone or PC in a suite of games called “The Solitaire Collection.”
It included the classics – Solitaire, FreeCell and Spider Solitaire, along with two other Solitaire modes – Pyramid and TriPeaks. All could be played as one-off games, but now there were also challenges, which gave you daily medals, which counted towards monthly achievements. Dopamine galore for any goal-oriented gamer. I greedily snatched them up.
This is how Solitaire mostly remained until Windows started including ads between draws, some of them un-mutable and unskippable, which made the collection of games nearly unplayable in my eyes. But by this point, there were plenty of other options available for the Solitaire-obsessed.
Do a quick search on the Google Play Store and you’ll find thousands of hits for Solitaire from a myriad of developers, some with full story modes, eye-catching art, or other game mechanics woven in. There are a slew of card-based indie games, like the 2024 smash hit Balatro, which credits Solitaire as its inspiration. And with mega-giants like Microsoft-owned Activision cashing in with their release of Candy Crush Solitaire earlier this year, it’s no surprise that this simple game has evolved just like we all have.
The world demanded it.
But for me, I’m a purist.
Nothing will ever replace the simple pleasure of organizing randomized stacks of cards into ordered piles, whether by number, suit, or alternating back and forth. Sometimes I long for the days when everything felt that simple – back when I was young and the world was smaller, still contained to my home and bus stop and school.
Back when I would play just to play, even with no one around to compete against. Just me. And a deck of cards.
CONTRIBUTING Carlie Procell
