| Maze War | |
|---|---|
Maze War played on a Xerox Star 8010 from 1985. |
|
| Developer(s) | Steve Colley |
| Platform(s) | Imlac PDS-1, Mac, NeXT Computer, PalmOS, Xerox Star, X11 |
| Release date(s) | INT 1974 |
| Genre(s) | First-person shooter |
| Mode(s) | Single player, multiplayer |
Maze War (also known as The Maze Game, Maze Wars, Mazewar or simply Maze) is a video game.
Maze War originated or disseminated a number of concepts used in thousands of games to follow, and is considered one of the earliest examples of, or progenitor of, a first-person shooter.[1] Uncertainty exists over its exact release date, with some accounts placing it before Spasim, the earliest first-person shooter with a known time of publication.
Although the first-person shooter genre did not crystallize for many years, Maze War had a profound impact on first-person games in other genres, particularly RPGs. The Maze War style view was first adopted by Moria in 1975, an early RPG on the PLATO network, and further popularized by Ultima and Wizardry, eventually appearing in bitmapped form in games like Dungeon Master, Phantasy Star, Eye of the Beholder and countless others.
Gameplay is simple by later standards. Players wander around a maze, being capable of moving backward or forwards, turning right or left in 90-degree increments, and peeking through doorways. The game also uses simple tile-based movement, where the player moves from square to square. Other players are seen as eyeballs. When a player sees another player, they can shoot, or negatively affect, them.[1] Players gain points for shooting other players, and lose them for being shot. Some versions (like the X11 port) had a cheat mode where the player running the server could see the other players' position on the map. Occasionally in some versions, a duck also appears in the passage.
Contents |
Features either invented for Maze War or disseminated by it include:
It was originally written by Steve Colley (later founder of nCUBE) in 1972-1973 on the Imlac PDS-1's at the NASA Ames Research Center in California. He had written a program for portraying and navigating mazes from a first-person perspective. The maze was depicted in memory with a 16 by 16 bit array. Colley writes:
Colley, Thompson, and Howard were part of a summer high school internship program at NASA.
In 1974, Greg Thompson brought the game with him when he went away to college at MIT.
The original Imlac networked version was limited to two players, with the Imlacs directly cabled to each other. At MIT, the game was expanded to a client-server system. The clients ran on Imlacs which had 50 kbit/s serial connections allowing them to communicate with PDP-10 computers running MIT's Incompatible Timesharing System (ITS). A server program on the mainframe coordinated up to eight clients playing against each other.
By using terminal servers, Imlacs at other colleges that were connected to the ARPAnet (the predecessor to the modern Internet) could connect to the server at MIT and play against players located across the United States.
At some point, a level editor was written so that the playing field could have different designs.
Also, a playing monitor was written. An Evans and Sutherland graphics terminal connected to the mainframe host could display a top-down map with all of the players' positions shown.
For a class in 1977, Thompson and others built a version of Maze entirely from TTL hardware, essentially creating a computer dedicated solely to playing Maze. Arcade games such as Pong had used this approach before. The TTL version of Maze used Tektronix oscilloscopes to display vector graphics. This was natural, since the Imlacs also used vector displays. This version introduced a full third dimension, by having a four-level maze with players able to climb up and down between levels. The game was so popular that even though it had been built as a class project it was kept assembled and operational for over a year.
In 1977, a staff member at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) rewrote Mazewar for the Xerox Alto and other Xerox Star machines. This was the first raster display version of Mazewar. It made use of the Alto's ethernet network, using the Xerox PUP network protocol. The Data General servers used on the network were capable of gatewaying games to remote office locations, allowing people at several Xerox sites to play against each other, making Mazewar capable of being played in four different configurations: peer to peer with two Imlacs, client-server with Imlacs and a PDP-10, in pure hardware, and over ethernet and PUP.
Several programmers at PARC 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.
In 1982, Christopher Kent (later Christopher Kantarjiev) saw Mazewar at RAND.
Kent later interned at Digital Equipment Corporation's Western Research Lab (DEC WRL) in Palo Alto during his Ph.D. studies. Several former PARC employees worked at WRL, and one of them, Gene McDaniel, gave Kent a hardcopy of the Mesa source code listing from the Xerox version of Maze, and the bitmap file that is used for the display.
The X Window System had been newly released as a result of collaborative efforts between DEC and MIT. Kent wrote a networked version of Mazewar which he released in December 1986. This version used UDP port 1111, and could be played by Unix workstations running X Window across the Internet. This was probably the second game which directly used TCP/IP, and the first which could be played across the Internet (1983's SGI Dogfight used broadcast packets and thus could not transit a router).
Using Kent's code, Oracle created a version of Maze running over Oracle SQL*Net over TCP/IP, Novell SPX/IPX, DECnet, and Banyan Vines at Fall Interop 92 on a number of workstations, including Unix machines from Sun, IBM, and SGI, as well as DEC VMS workstations and MS-Windows. Attendees could play against each other at stations placed throughout the Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco.
A 30th anniversary retrospective was hosted by the Vintage Computer Festival held at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View CA on November 7th, 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 project.[2]
