Minesweeper 64

Ever want to play the original Windows Minesweeper game on the Nintendo 64? Well, here is Minesweeper 64 to by VRGL117 Games to keep you procrastinating. It was released on 20 Oct 2019, where it was used as a demonstration for PRGE 2019.

You can get the ROM from its download page by using the password kaboom. You can also see the source code on Github.

About Minesweeper 64

If you’ve played the original Minesweeper from 1990 or any of the versions that came after, you’ll know what to expect.

The objective of the game is to reveal the entire map without tripping on any mines. It takes place on a grid of squares, each one may contain a mine in it. Once you uncover it, you either find a mine (and lose ) or get a clue. Clues are numbers; they tell you how many mines there are in adjacent tiles (vertically, horizontally or diagonally).

By using the patterns which are formed by the clues, you can determine where the mines are. For example, a corner with al 1’s means that there’s a mine there. Or a straight edge with a 3 means that there’s three mines in a row.

Minesweeper 64 seeks to do just that, be a faithful adaptation of the classic game on the yet emerging N64 Libdragon ecosystem.

PRGE 2019

The Portland Retro Gaming Expo (PRGE) hosted Victor Vieux’s presentation about N64 development back in October 2019 when this game was released. There are two videos showing the presentation and where he does some live programming showing how Minesweeper 64 was made, step by step.

Review and conclusion

The game itself is a basic implementation of Minesweeper 64. It works, but there are no frills. You have a chance of hitting a mine on your first pick, there are no difficulty levels, you can softlock a match by putting a flag down by mistake (they cannot be removed), and there is no victory message like there is for defeat.

But that’s not what it’s meant to be. It serves more as a tech demo to show that development for the Nintendo 64 isn’t as intimidating as you’d think it to be, which was important in 2019 when Libdragon was still in its infancy. There were people in the comments that thought that N64 games were made in Assembly and were glad to see that N64 homebrew development was possible.

Even though it’s not exactly an ideal version of the original game, Minesweeper 64 serves a point to demystify N64 development – to make it accessible to people who want to give it a shot. And that in itself is an achievement worth celebrating.