Mini Putt

Summer 1987, scorching heat, nothing to play anywhere — and suddenly minigolf on the monitor. No, it wasn't anything like a real course with a bent pipe and a windmill, but on the hardware available back then, it was a small miracle from the Canadian studio Artech.

Mini Putt is exactly what the name says — miniature golf for MS-DOS. No story, no campaign, just a set of holes, a ball, and the goal to get it in the cup with as few strokes as possible. It was sport in its purest sense: you versus the hole, versus your own impatience.

The controls worked on a principle that many sports games used back then — aim and power. The player sees their character ready to swing at the bottom of the screen, sets the direction, and then hits the spacebar. The power of the stroke increases until you interrupt it. Simple mechanics, but that waiting loop with rising power reliably turns calm gameplay into mild stress. Miss the timing once, the ball flies over, and you feel completely incompetent. The second attempt becomes a matter of honor.

What keeps the game's head above water even today is precisely this honest simplicity. Artech didn't reinvent the wheel — they took a working game loop, wrapped it in EGA graphics, and let players have fun. By today's standards, the game looks like something from prehistory, but in 1987, EGA was the standard and the ball's movement across the course was smooth enough to work. Sound effects from the PC speaker — well, that was sound design courtesy of beeps. Sound Blaster wasn't a given back then.

Today, Mini Putt fits best with anyone who wants ten minutes to turn their brain off. No tutorials, no cutscenes, no microtransactions. Putt, beep, hole — done. In a browser, it's the ideal break-time game that reminds you that fun in 1987 didn't need forty gigabytes of disk space.