Mahjong

Mahjong. A peculiar adaptation of a thousand-year-old Chinese game to the computer, where it moves up and down on the screen like some digital puzzle. It's not a bad idea, it's just an idea that's... there.

In the mid-eighties, you could play one of the oldest games ever on PC — a modern take on Chinese mahjong, where you get rid of pairs of identical tiles from a chaotic heap of puzzles. The goal is simple: match all the tiles before you run out of moves. Individual versions differ in layout — some pyramid, tower, temple, network of lines, or just a nameless pile. Same principle, just the heap looks different.

Controls are straightforward. You click on the first tile, then the second. Do they match? They disappear. Don't they match? You start over. Eighties computer graphics — pixels that you know what they represent only after staring at them for a while. Sound is more of an absence of sound, just the occasional beep when you make a wrong move. These days they'd call it minimalist. In 1986 they called it reality.

Mahjong was a breakthrough. Once upon a time, this was "grandma's game," something you could play on a computer, which sounded pretty futuristic back then. Now it's just a casual logic puzzle with no pressure, no time limit, no dramatic attempt to impress you with anything more than solving a puzzle. In the nineties and 2000s, hundreds of clones and variations evolved from this. This original DOS piece is their ancestor, but in today's competition it's just a memory of a time when this was enough.

Today you'll play it in an emulator or a browser, because this is a game you don't want to play, but you want to play it. The difference is that you'll pick it up for a moment when your brain can't handle anything more complex, and then you'll set it down again. It's a game without ambition and without drama. Which is precisely why it's lasted forty years.