Mine Field was written for the Apple II in December 1978 by Chuck Sommerville.

The game is a 38*48 grid with 24 mines. You move at a fixed speed and your job is to cross the minefield without hitting a mine. Your score is the number of successful crossings in your current session. Your first attempt is left-to-right but the direction flips after each successful crossing.

The game was sold as 'Funpak I' on a cassette that also featured Canyon Bomber, Rat Race Maze, Music Machine and Sound.

In an online interview in December 2017 Somerville stated that when the Apple II was released in June 1977, he ordered one immediately and wrote a number guessing game. He was in the "Talented and Gifted" programme in Pennington, West Virginia, and had learned to code in FOCAL and BASIC on a PDP-11. "There was a guy who was trying to start a software company out of my hometown, and he found me, and I wrote a couple of dumb programs in BASIC and they were released on tape, but it didn't turn into anything". In a 2019 Retro Gamer interview he recalls, "I actually made a little bit of money from him, maybe $500, not a lot". The company was called Systems Design Lab.

Mine Field was written in Integer BASIC and is specific to the Apple II machine (the Apple II Plus switched to Applesoft BASIC). The WAV file can be converted into code using tools such as CiderPress.

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.