Microsoft Entertainment Pack was designed by the company's “Entry Business” team, whose job was to make Windows more appealing to homes and small businesses. Ex-Microsoft product manager Bruce Ryan said the company did this because it "was concerned that the operating system’s high hardware requirements meant that people would only see it as a tool for large enterprises". The project had "almost no budget", and no major video game publishers got involved because they doubted Windows' legitimacy as a gaming platform; therefore Ryan compiled a series of games that Windows employees had been working on in their spare time. For much of the early 1990s, the Gamesampler, a subset of the Entertainment Pack small enough to fit on a single
high-density disk, was shipped as a free eleventh disk added to a ten-pack of
Verbatim blank 3.5" microfloppy diskettes. Games on the sampler included
Jezzball, ''Rodent's Revenge
, Tetris
, and Skifree''. A "Best of" disk of several of the games was also available at times as a mail-in premium from
Kellogg's cereals. All games being 16-bit run on modern 32-bit versions of Windows but not on 64-bit Windows. Support for all versions of Microsoft Entertainment Pack ended on January 31, 2003. In the copies of
Windows NT 4.0 and
Windows 2000 source code which
leaked in 2004, there are 32-bit versions of
Cruel,
Golf,
Pegged,
Reversi,
Snake (
Rattler Race),
Taipei and
TicTactics. However,
FreeCell and
Minesweeper have had official 32-bit versions bundled even with early versions of
Windows NT. The original game developers of some of the games such as
SkiFree,
TriPeaks, and
WordZap now offer 32-bit versions. Third-party developers have also created 32-bit freeware
clones of
Klotski,
TetraVex, ''Rodent's Revenge
, Tetris
, and Taipei''. ==Reception==