Mahjong

Mahjong or Mah Jongg is a Chinese game that was invented some time in the 19^th century, maybe in the Opium Wars, maybe as late as 1875. It is similar to Western card games (it has been compared with Rummy), but is played with bamboo tiles. It was soon retconned to date back to the times of Confucius, yes, to have been invented by Confucius himself. The three cardinal tiles, so it was said, represent the three cardinal Confucian virtues, which, incidentially, they well may.

Mah Jongg – The REAL Game!

While Mahjong was something of a fad in the US of the twenties, and continues to be played, though with rules different from the original ones, computer implementations of the actual game have remained rare (Mah Jongg – The REAL Game! and Hong Kong Mahjong Pro are examples). Mahjong computer games are nearly always solitaire puzzles.

This solitaire was created in 1981 by Brodie Lockard on the PLATO. He named it simply Mah-Jongg. 1986 he re-created it for Activision as a commercial Macintosh game. It was now called Shanghai, and soon ported to every then relevant platform. There were even arcade machines. It is interesting to see that Shanghai II (1989) was still very similar to the original Mac game, while Super Shanghai (1992) has, apart from some sort of background story, elements introduced by the PC shareware games, like fancy, varying tilesets.

For there were lots of freeware and shareware Mahjongs, mainly on the PC. Some were one-time endeavours, but others were developed over the years, and these were the first to introduce what would become very popular in the 90s: user-created content. Before there were Doom WADs and Warcraft PODs, there were Mahjong tilesets, lots and lots of them. There were even tile set manager programs!

Taipei

The first notable Mahjong (other than Shanghai) on the PC was a Windows game written by a Microsoft programmer, Dave Norris. It dates back to the times of Windows 1.0 and originally had only the turtle layout. Version 4.0 was part of the Entertainment Pack for Windows and had multiple layouts. The last version, Taipei 5.00 (1991), supported background bitmaps. Taipei was not such a big thing as the others that would soon follow, and it never had multiple tilesets, but it was the first.

Taipei Downloads

Taipei 3.10

Taipei 5.00

Nels Anderson

His game was simply called Mah Jongg, it ran in EGA, had no mouse support or option to create your own tilesets till version 3.4 in 1990. But it must have been extremely popular, for more than 800 tilesets were created for it, more than for any other Mahjong.

Nels Anderson never ported his game to Windows, but in the mid-90s he remade it as Dragons Bane with SVGA graphics, but this version didn't share the popularity of the former, simpler game.

Dragons Bane

Ron Balewski

His Mah Jongg -V-G-A- hit the computer world two years after Nels Anderson's game, but it was he who first introduced user-created tilesets with version 2.0 still in the same year, 1989. More than a hundred tilesets are available for Mah Jongg -V-G-A-.

As the name implies, this game ran in VGA only, but originally there was a simpler variant as well, Mah Jongg LapTop for CGA. There was a version for 8514/A (1024×768, 256 colors), which however never got past beta stage. In 1992, there was a not further developed Mah Jongg for Windows. The last appearance of this game was as Mah Jongg '97, a 32-bit game that has become hard to find.

Ron Balewski Downloads

Mah Jongg -V-G-A-

Mah Jongg --8514--

Mah Jongg LapTop

Mah Jongg for Windows

Kyodai

This is the next generation of Mahjong games. That René-Gilles Deberdt, who uses the handle Naoki Haga, originally wanted to call it Lunatic Shanghai brought him some trouble with Activision, and started a long Usenet discussion about the origins of the game.

Kyodai was a Windows project from the start, had background music, high-resolution graphics. The later instances are among the few games that support Matrox' EMBM (Dungeon Keeper 2 is another one).

Kyodai Downloads