Mine Field was written in 1989 for MS-DOS by Kim Moser.

The game is a 76*21 grid with 180 mines. Your job is to navigate from the top left corner to the bottom right corner. When you are next to one or more mines a "MINE NEAR!" warning will be displayed. The warning does not tell you how many mines are near. You can change the difficulty level in the code by changing the LEVEL value.

The default setting provides the player with 10 bricks. These can be thrown one space in any direction by pressing [CONTROL] and your direction using the number keys. If the brick lands on a mine it will explode and become a crater. If the space was safe you can pick up the brick and use it again later.

Moser told msgame (2022) the game was based on his earlier Commodore PET 2001 game; however, this MS-DOS version remains unfinished. For example, the "headquarters" icon is not shown in the bottom right corner and there is no code to check if you've won the game! The code also has the MINEFORE variable set to WHITE so all the mines are visible (this was for debugging purposes). The downloads section has the original code, some modified code (to hide the mines and to fix some compiling errors so you can edit mines and bricks) and a compiled EXE.

The following attributes can be used to map the evolution of Minesweeper. Blue cells are confirmed attributes for official versions of Mine Field. Yellow cells are unknown.