During the 90s there wasn’t Steam, Reddit, Twitter or Facebook. Instead, when you switched on the PC the most easily accessible timewaster was Microsoft Solitaire. Still popular in government departments the country through, the game has now been inducted into the World Video Game Hall of Fame. It joins the likes of Doom, The Legend of Zelda and Pac-Man in The Strong National Museum of Play in Rochester, New York.

Granted, Solitaire is not the first to come to mind when you think about iconic games, perhaps because it was a previously existing card game. However, because it was installed on every version of Microsoft’s Windows OS, from 1990 to Windows 8.1 in 2013, it has appeared on more than a billion PC the world over. How many times the game was completed, providing the satisfying cascading cards effect, is not known.

On the Video Game Hall of Fame website, it’s noted that, “Microsoft Solitaire was tremendously influential and is, perhaps, one of the most widely played games of all time.” The game joins three more video games inducted in 2019: the classic Super Mario Kart, bloody Mortal Kombat, and the text-based Colossal Cave Adventure, which fewer people might be familiar with since it was released way back in 1972.

This brings the total amount of games in the World Video Game Hall of Fame to 20, alongside others the likes of Final Fantasy VII, Donkey Kong, Halo: Combat Evolved and Grand Theft Auto III.