Slate names our favorite office time-waster as most-played game of all time

By Mike Smith

What’s the most popular video game ever made? Tetris? Pokemon? The Sims? Nope - according to a Slate article
published this week, it’s Solitaire. Included by default on every
single Windows PC in the world, Solitaire has been a popular diversion
for bored office workers for decades, even causing New York office
worker Ed Greenwood to be fired when city mayor Michael Bloomberg
spotted him playing it on the clock.

And if we’re honest, if we
had bosses like Bloomberg, we’d probably have been fired by now too. A
1994 Washington Post article details Solitaire’s development
motivation: apparently, when designing Windows 3.0, Microsoft execs
wanted to include a simple game that would relax computing newcomers.
What’s more familiar than a pack of cards? The game also provided a
surreptitious way to train users in the click-and-drag concepts
fundamental to the new age of graphical user interfaces without them
feeling patronized or getting bored.