Given away free with all IBM-compatible PCs for the last decade or so, this innocuous little single-player puzzle game is surely responsible for more stress-alleviation (and time wasting during office hours) than any other, apart, perhaps, from the Solitaire card-game variants also installed on new PC hard-drives.

The game's very simple: you have a small, medium or large grid of tiles with a set number of mines hidden underneath, and the idea is to uncover all the mines in the fastest possible time, without setting them off. It's terribly simple but with a level of depth, subtlety and skill that wasn't at all obvious to start with. The way to discover the mines was to click on an initial tile and if it was removed without exploding (you'd have to be very unlucky to hit one first time, but it did happen) a number under the tile would tell you how many adjacent tiles contained mines. Working out which ones were clear was the real skill.

Minesweeper's a tremendous game and not only fully deserves it's place in this Hall of Fame, but fully deserved to be included in our recent Games of the Millennium feature, simply because it's been played by literally millions of people around the world. See, some other good things come for free too!