Minesweeper With a Million Cells Makes the Classic Game Last Forever

Minesweeper is a classic, hard to put down game that I remember fondly from childhood on my parents' computer. I felt like I could play it forever. Now, with this fan made Minesweeper variant with a million cells, I might as well.

Minesweeper came pre-loaded on Microsoft operating systems starting with Windows 3.1, going all the way up to Windows 7. In the game, you click on squares that either reveal open space, a number or a mine. The numbers correlate to how many mines are adjacent to that square. If you click on a 1, you might be able to do a little more exploring nearby. If you click on a 3, you're probably going to end up finding a mine. If you do click on a mine, it will explode, ending the game.

In the versions that I've played, most memorably on Windows 95 when many people first discovered the game, you play with 100 cells. That's already difficult, especially if you're a child. Well, coder Andrew Stein built a version with one million cells. I weep.

It's very, very easy to lose this version of Minesweeper. The cells are endless--the landscape of gray square after gray square is mind boggling. No matter how many mines you find, there's potentially thousands to uncover. It ends up recreating my perplexed, child's experience of Minesweeper, where I didn't really know the rules and figured out the puzzle just by doing it a lot. I don't know if you can brute force a Minesweeper of this size, but I'm excited to find out.