The History of Minesweeper

Our original Minesweeper game is based off the classic Windows version. Minesweeper was first released by Microsoft in 1990, and every release of Windows since then has had a version of the game.

The history of Minesweeper goes back to the early 80's when many 'mine' games were released for early home computers. The earliest proven digital ancestor of Minesweeper is Mined-Out, which was released for the Sinclair Spectrum in 1983. Board games like Battleship and versions played on paper have been enjoyed for decades before that, and all contributed in their own way to what would ultimately became Minesweeper.

The game evolved over the 1980's into the game we love today. Most of the key features like right-click (to mark a mine) and numbers (showing you adjacent bombs) evolved in the last 2-3 years of the 80's.

This browser based, online version is maintained by the Free Video Games Project and was originally developed by Shep Poor in 2005. Shep's original early Javascript 1.1 version was a masterpiece, and it's a credit to how well it was coded back then that much of that code still works unmodified today. Over the years we have significantly developed and added to the game, to play nicer on modern browsers, and most recently to add capabilities so that it now works on mobile devices and tablets too.

Minesweeper was the ultimate office computer game in the 90's and remains hugely popular to this day. FreeMinesweeper.org is the original and #1 online Minesweeper website, and has served over a billion Minesweeper games since launch in 2010. In 2022 we embarked on a major overhaul to refresh the design, and add necessary support for phones and tablets.

We hope you like and enjoy Free Minesweeper!

P.S. Don't hesitate to contact us if you have feedback or suggestions, or find any bugs in our revamped site.