The History of Mahjong Solitaire: From a Hospital Bed to Every Computer in America

The tile art makes Mahjong Solitaire feel ancient — like something handed down for generations alongside the four-player game it borrows its look from. It isn't. The pyramid-clearing, single-player game you're playing right now is younger than the Rubik's Cube, and it can be traced back to one specific person, one specific year, and one specific reason he built it.

The Much Older Game It Borrowed From

Real Mahjong is the actually old part of this story. It emerged in China during the Qing dynasty, in the 19th century, most likely evolved from a combination of the older game of dominoes and Ma-Tiae, a Chinese card game dating back to the Ming dynasty. It spread as a four-player game of drawing and discarding tiles to build a winning hand — racks, a wall of tiles, calls of "Pong" and "Chow" — with no pyramid, no solitaire variant, and nothing resembling the pairs-matching puzzle this site is built around.

That's the entire connection: a shared tile set, borrowed by an unrelated game invented roughly a century later, on the other side of the world.

Brodie Lockard, 1981

Mahjong Solitaire was designed in 1981 by Brodie Lockard, an electrical engineering student at the University of Arizona. Lockard had become quadriplegic after a trampoline accident, and he built the game on the PLATO computer system, typing with a mouth stick. He called it "Mah-Jongg," and he was the one who came up with the now-familiar shape: tiles tapering upward layer by layer into a peak, with the puzzle solved by clearing identical pairs that are exposed and unblocked.

Every core piece of the game as it exists today — the tapering stack, the free/blocked tile rule, matching down to an empty board — was already in place in this first version. Nothing fundamental about the design has changed in the decades since.

Going Commercial: Shanghai

Lockard's version circulated on PLATO, an academic and research network, which limited how far it could spread on its own. Wider popularity came in 1986, when Activision published Shanghai, a commercial release for the Atari ST, Macintosh, and other home computers of the era. Shanghai was popular enough that its name stuck to the whole genre — plenty of players still call any Mahjong Solitaire game "Shanghai" today, whether or not it has anything to do with the original release.

Taipei, Titan, and Windows

The game's next major push came from Microsoft. In 1990, the Microsoft Entertainment Pack for Windows 3.x included a version under the name Taipei, putting it in front of the first wave of home PC users. Microsoft later bundled a version called Mahjong Titan directly with Windows itself, which meant the game reached millions of computers that never had to seek it out — it was simply already installed.

The Web and Mobile Era

From there, the game spread the way most simple, replayable puzzles do once the web and app stores exist: countless browser versions, mobile apps, and casual-game portals, each with its own tile art, board shapes, and extra features layered on top. What's stayed constant through all of it is the part Brodie Lockard designed on a PLATO terminal in 1981 — free tiles, blocked tiles, and clearing the board one matching pair at a time. That's still the entire game, more than forty years later.