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You know Minesweeper, of course. It's video game wallpaper that's silently seeped into countless people's lives. Everyone can recount the basics; the left-mouse button reveals the contents of a tile whilst the right flags a tile as containing a mine. The levels vary from 8x8 grids up to huge 64x64 grids. There's the smiley face when you do well, the gasp of failure and the cross-eyed look of death when you fare slightly worse. The mechanical logic would make a chess grandmaster grin, while bold gamblers still chase quicker and quicker clearance times. Minesweeper wasn't the first of its kind. That credit goes to a lesser known, tightly designed game by Ian Andrew. Andrew has had a long career in games which began when, as a child, he'd modify his wooden pinball table with nails and elastic bands. Soon he moved on to the ZX081, and his very first commercial game, Mined-Out.
"Mined-Out was developed partly due to the Sinclair Spectrum's limitations of colour blocks on the screen," Andrew recounts. "You could only have 2 different colours in each 'character square' which was 8 by 8 pixels big. So a block/grid game was a natural for this computer. I was only a Basic programmer so puzzle/thought games were a natural fit as well."
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