Later in the interview, Simonyi admitted that his decision to include the game in the Operating System was fuelled not by a desire for more innovative gameplay, but simply to prove that in a corporation with 70,000 employees, Bill Gates does not make each decision the public finds unpalatable.īill Gates explains how to play BSoD during Windows conferences.

this is more difficult to explain than I thought.'

Years later in an MSNBC interview, Simonyi recalled that the game was 'a bit like a Russian Reversal' in which 'the game, as if it were played in Soviet Russia, is more like the game you're playing is you. He decided to include a highly conceptual game which - differing from Microsoft mainstays like Solitaire, Minesweeper and Failing A Network Connection - would actually decide itself when it was to be played, choosing mostly to be played when you are working on something important or masturbating. However, in the July of 1994, with the highly anticipated release of Windows 95 still over a year away, Microsoft executive Charles Simonyi had a vision of including the new game for free with the still-hypothetical operating system, figuring that this would cause a major sales boost, and would coincide with the all the banks computers being swapped out for an Apple Mac to handle the increase in revenue. This would cause a major crash in Microsoft's bank balance. The Blue Screen of Death was originally going to be sold as stand alone retail software, but the project was canceled amid concerns that profits made from the sale would exceed the total amount of money that could be held on all the banks' computers, which were running Windows 3.11 at the time. His vision was for every home and office to have every screen as a blue screen. The Blue Screen of Death was a concept that Bill Gates had spent a lifetime dreaming about.

Microsoft minesweeper crashes