Windows Reversi

~ the goodbye ~

The games in the box when i arrived were Solitaire and Minesweeper. Reversi had been taken out six years before that and i have never once seen it running on a real machine. Its whole working life happened in a country and a decade where a Windows PC in a home was a rare object, and in Turkey in that window there was no home version of this story to have.

Chris Peters wrote it in 1984, on the Windows team, as one of several experiments in whether you could write an application for this system at all. It was a proof that the thing worked. Tandy Trower pushed to have the experiments shipped, on the argument that Windows should come with small programs the way the Macintosh did, and that Microsoft could afford a little frivolity in a box that was going into corporate offices anyway.

So Reversi went out with Windows 1.01 on 20 November 1985 as the only game in the release. It was mouse-driven, which mattered more than the game did, since the mouse was the part of Windows most buyers had never touched. It stayed in Windows 2 unchanged and was still there in Windows 3.0, sitting next to the newcomer that would make the category famous.

~ the chronicle ~

~ how it landed ~

Reversi is a Victorian English board game from 1883, with two men claiming to have invented it and neither claim settled. A Japanese remake in the early 1970s renamed it Othello and gave it the green board and the black-and-white discs that most people picture. The rules are famously simple to state and famously hard to play, which is the profile of a game that appeals to people who like a solved problem.

That is exactly what went wrong with it as a bundled game. It suited a hacker's temperament rather than an office worker's coffee break. You could lose to the machine in a way that felt like being told you were stupid, and the board gave you no cheap dopamine on the way down. Solitaire arrived in Windows 3.0 in 1990 and was instantly the more popular thing on the same disc.

~ the day it died ~

Windows 3.1 shipped on 6 April 1992 with Minesweeper where Reversi had been. Minesweeper was written by Robert Donner and Curt Johnson in their own time, out of the Microsoft Entertainment Pack, and the story that got repeated afterward is that Bill Gates was playing it so much he deleted it from his own machine and started using other people's. Whatever the truth of that, the swap was a straight replacement rather than an addition.

Nothing was said about Reversi. It was not deprecated and it got no farewell dialog, it was simply absent from the next disc. Every other Windows game from that era got a second life of some kind, in a rerelease or in an emulator people load for the nostalgia. Reversi got a Wikipedia line and an icon of four discs on a white square.

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