Maze War

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Maze War (also known as The Maze Game, Maze Wars or simply Maze) was a historically significant computer game. It originated a number of concepts used in thousands (perhaps tens of thousands) of games to follow, including:

First-person 3D Perspective. Players saw the playing field as if they themselves were walking around in it, with the maze walls rendered in isomorphic perspective. This makes the game not only the first First-person shooter, but also makes it an antecedent of Virtual Reality systems.
Avatars. Players were represented to each other as eyeballs.
Mapping a "level". Players created a visual map of the playfield as they progressed.
Representation of a player's position on a playfield map. This is somewhat similar to the playing field of a side-view or second-person perspective game, but is only used for position reference as opposed to being the primary depiction of play. It does not normally depict opponents.

Maze War was also possibly the first multiplayer networked computer game, in which people at different computers play with each other over a computer network. It was, of course, also the first game to combine these elements, thus creating prior art which enabled thousands of later games to be developed without concern for intellectual property disputes involving these elements.

Game play is simple by later standards. Players wander around a maze, being capable of moving backward or forwards, and turning right or left, and peeking through doorways. Other players are seen as eyeballs. When a player sees another player, they can shoot them. Players gain points for shooting other players, and lose them for being shot. Occasionally in some versions, a duck also appears in the passage.

It was originally written by Steve Colley in 1972-1973 on the Imlac PDS-1 at the NASA Ames Research Center in California. He had written a program for portraying and navigating mazes from a 3D isomorphic first-person perspective. The maze was depicted in memory with a 16 by 16 bit array. Colley writes:

Maze was popular at first but quickly became boring. Then someone (Howard or Greg) had the idea to put people in the maze. To do this would take more than one Imlac, which at that time were not networked together. So we connected two Imlacs using the serial ports to transmit locations back and forth. This worked great, and soon the idea for shooting each other came along, and the first person shooter was born.

(Excerpted from Colley's reminisces for the 30th anniversary of Maze War)

( "Greg" refers to Greg Thompson and "Howard" is Howard Palmer)

Soon after, the Imlacs were networked to the IBM 1800, and Greg Thompson (later founder of nCube) modified the game to use the network. Thompson then brought the game with him when he moved to MIT where it was rewritten for the Xerox Alto. Copies of this version were sent to Xerox PARC, arriving by 1976 and played at least thru the mid-1980s. Several programmers there cheated by modifying the code so that they could see the positions of other players on the playfield map. This upset the authors enough that the source code was subsequently stored in an encrypted form, the only program on the system to receive this protection. This is interesting in light of the fact that this laboratory housed many of the most important programming developments of the time, including the first Graphic User Interfaces. At some point code was added to allow the game to be played over ARPAnet, allowing users to play over Wide Area Networks.

As with many popular games, Maze War was ported to or re-written for a great number of computer platforms. Versions include:

original IMLAC version
MIT Project MAC on Xerox Altos and "D* Machines" running on early Ethernet.
Mac version called MazeWars+ (MacroMind, 1987)
MIDI Maze, a version for Atari ST home computers, using the MIDI interface for network connection
SGI IRIX port
a version for NeXT computers
a version for Palm OS

SGI sponsored an appearance of the game at the InterOp tradeshow in 1993 to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the game. Networked SGI workstations were placed in various locations around the exhibit hall so that attendees could play against each other.

A 30th anniversary retrospective was held at the Vintage Computer Festival in 2004.

Steve Colley subsequently worked on very early versions of Mars rover technology for NASA, and found that his 3D perspective work on Maze Wars was useful for this work.