On Thursday, well-known video game developer Donald Rumsfeld, who also twice served as secretary of defense, released a mobile game called Churchill Solitaire. It’s out for iOS now, with an Android version to come.


The Wall Street Journal’s got a great story on the 83-year-old Rumsfeld’s design techniques—“We need to do a better job on these later versions. They just get new glitches... [W]e ought to find some way we can achieve steady improvement instead of simply making new glitches.”—and it’s full of incredible nuggets like this:

Mr. Rumsfeld can’t code. He doesn’t much even use a computer. But he guided his young digitally minded associates who assembled the videogame with the same method he used to rule the Pentagon—a flurry of memos called snowflakes. As a result, “Churchill Solitaire” is likely the only videogame developed by an 83-year-old man using a Dictaphone to record memos for the programmers.


Wonderful. Read the full WSJ article for more on the game, whose creators describe it as “the most diabolical version of Solitaire ever devised.”

You can reach the author of this post at jason@kotaku.com or on Twitter at @jasonschreier.