Maze War (also known as The Maze Game, Maze Wars, Mazewar, or simply Maze) was a historically significant computer game.
Maze War originated or disseminated a number of concepts used in thousands (perhaps tens of thousands) of games to follow. Both the innovation and the combining of these elements created prior art which enabled thousands of later games to be developed without concern for intellectual property disputes involving these features. Prior art (also known as or State of the art, which also has other meanings in most systems of Patent law constitutes all Information that Intellectual property ( IP) is a legal field that refers to creations of the mind such as musical literary and artistic works inventions and symbols names
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. For duck as a food see Duck (food; for other meanings see Duck (disambiguation.
Contents |
Mazewar Innovations
Features either invented for Maze War or disseminated by it include:
- First-person 3D Perspective. In video games first person refers to a graphical perspective rendered from the viewpoint of the player character Players saw the playing field as if they themselves were walking around in it, with the maze walls rendered in one point perspective. This makes the game one of the first, if not the first First-person shooter. A first-person shooter ( FPS) is an action Video game from the Shooter game The initial development of Maze War It also could be considered a very early virtual reality system. Virtual reality ( VR) is a technology which allows a user to interact with a Computer-simulated environment be it a real or imagined one
- Avatars. An avatar is a computer user's representation of himself/herself or alter ego whether in the form of a three-dimensional model used in computer games a two-dimensional Icon Players were represented to each other as eyeballs. While some earlier games represented players as spacecraft or as dots, this was probably the first computer game to represent players as organic beings.
- Player's position depicted on level map. Representation of a player's position on a playing field map. Unlike the playing field of a side-view or second-person perspective, this is only used for position reference as opposed to being the primary depiction of play. It does not normally depict opponents. The combination of a first-person view and a top-down, second-person view has been used in many games since.
- Level editor. A program was written to edit the playing field design.
- Network play. Probably the first game ever to be played between two peer-to-peer computers, as opposed to earlier multiplayer games which were generally based on a minicomputer or mainframe with players using either terminals or specialized controls, in 1973. For other uses of the term see Peer-to-peer (disambiguation For peer-to-peer networks used for file sharing see File sharing A minicomputer (colloquially mini) is a class of multi-user Computers that lies in the middle range of the computing spectrum in between the largest Multi-user
- Client-server networked play. An updated version may well have been the first client-server game, with workstations running the client connecting to a mainframe running a server program. The client-server Software architecture model distinguishes client systems from server systems which communicate over a Computer network This version could be played across the ARPANET, in 1977. The ARPANET ( Advanced Research Projects Agency Network) developed by ARPA of the United States Department of Defense, was the world's first operational
- Observer mode. In the 1977 version, a graphics terminal could be used by observers to watch the game in progress without participating.
- Internet play. Yet another port was probably the first network-aware game which could be played across the modern Internet, in 1986.
- Online chat between players. While probably not the first game to feature this, it certainly was a very early example.
- Modifying clients in order to cheat at the game.
- Encrypting source code to prevent cheating.
Versions
1973, Imlacs at NASA
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. nCUBE was a series of Parallel computing computers from the company of the same name The Imlac PDS-1 is a graphical Minicomputer made by Imlac Corporation (founded in 1968 of Needham Massachusetts. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration ( NASA, ˈnæsə is an agency of the United States government, responsible for the nation's public space program NASA Ames Research Center (ARC is a NASA facility located at Moffett Federal Airfield, which covers 43 acres at the borders of the cities of Mountain View California ( is a US state on the West Coast of the United States, along the Pacific Ocean. 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)
Colley, Thompson, and Howard were part of a summer high school internship program at NASA. High school is the name used in some parts of the world (in particular Scotland, North America and Australia) to describe an institution An intern or stagiaire is one who works in a temporary position with an emphasis on on-the-job training rather than merely employment making it similar to an Apprenticeship
1974, Imlacs at MIT
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). The PDP-10 was a Mainframe computer manufactured by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC from the late 1960s on the name stands for "Programmed Data Processor ITS, the Incompatible Timesharing System (named in comparison with the Compatible Time-Sharing System also in use at MIT was an early revolutionary and influential 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. A terminal server is a specialized computer which aggregates multiple communication channels together The ARPANET ( Advanced Research Projects Agency Network) developed by ARPA of the United States Department of Defense, was the world's first operational The United States of America —commonly referred to as the
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. Evans & Sutherland ( is a Computer firm involved in the Computer graphics field
1977, TTL at MIT
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. Transistor–transistor logic ( TTL) is a class of Digital circuits built from Bipolar junction transistors (BJT and Resistors It is called Arcade games such as Pong had used this approach before. Pong is a first generation Video game released originally as a Coin -operated Arcade game by Atari Inc The TTL version of Maze used Tektronix oscilloscopes to display vector graphics. Tektronix Inc is a North American company best known for its test and measurement equipment such as Oscilloscopes Logic analyzers, and video and mobile An oscilloscope (commonly abbreviated to scope or O-scope) is a type of Electronic test equipment that allows signal Voltages to be viewed Vector graphics is the use of geometrical primitives such as points lines, Curves and shapes or Polygon (s which are all based 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.
1977, Xerox
In 1977, a staff member at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) rewrote Mazewar for the Xerox Alto and other Xerox Star machines. Xerox Corporation ( (name ˈziːrɒks is a global document management company which manufactures and sells a range of color and black-and-white printers, multifunction PARC (Palo Alto Research Center Inc formerly Xerox PARC, is a Research and development company in Palo Alto California that began as a division of The Xerox Alto was an early Personal computer developed at Xerox PARC in 1973. The Star Workstation, officially known as the Xerox 8010 Information System, was introduced This was the first raster display version of Mazewar. It made use of the Alto's ethernet network, using the Xerox PUP network protocol. Ethernet is a family of frame -based Computer networking technologies for Local area networks (LANs 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. Data General was one of the first Minicomputer firms from the late 1960s
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.
1986, Digital Equipment Corporation
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. Digital Equipment Corporation was a pioneering American company in the Computer industry Palo Alto (ˌpæloʊˈæltoʊ from Spanish: palo: "stick" and alto: "high" i 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. Hard Copy is an American tabloid news television show that ran in syndication from 1989 to 1999 Mesa is a programming language developed at Xerox PARC. The name Mesa was a pun referring to its design intent to be a "high-level"
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 of 1986. This version used UDP port 1111, and could be played by Unix workstations running X Window across the Internet. User Datagram Protocol ( UDP) is one of the core protocols of the Internet Protocol Suite. 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). Silicon Graphics Inc (commonly initialised to SGI, historically sometimes referred to as Silicon Graphics Computer Systems or SGCS) is a company
1992, Oracle SQL*Net
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. The City and County of San Francisco is the fourth most populous city
Other versions
- 1982, Snipes by SuperSet Software. This used semaphores in a shared file which resided on a network drive. It was written as a demonstration program for SuperSet's Local Area Network system, which became Novell Netware. NetWare is a Network operating system developed by Novell Inc
- 1987, MacroMind MazeWars+ for the Apple Macintosh. MacroMind was an Apple Macintosh software company founded in Chicago in 1984 by Marc Canter, Jay Macintosh, commonly nicknamed Mac is a Brand name which covers several lines of Personal computers designed developed and marketed by Apple Inc Fully 3D (multiple vertical game levels) and could be played over Appletalk networks. AppleTalk is a proprietary suite of protocols developed by Apple Inc for networking computers It was distributed by Apple with new Macintoshes for some period of time.
- 1987, MIDI Maze, a Maze War-inspired game for the Atari ST home computers, which used the MIDI interface for network connection
- a version has been written for NeXT computers
- a version has been written for Palm OS
Retrospective
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. MIDI Maze was an early First person shooter Video game for the Atari ST developed by Xanth Software F/X, published by The Atari ST is a home / Personal computer that was commercially available from 1985 to the early 1990s MIDI ( Musical Instrument Digital Interface, ˈmɪdi is an industry-standard protocol that enables Electronic musical instruments Computers NeXT Computer Inc (later NeXT Software Inc) was an American Computer company headquartered in Redwood City, California that Palm OS (also known as Garnet OS) is an embedded Operating system initially developed by U The Vintage Computer Festival (VCF is an international event celebrating the history of Computing.
Maze alumni
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. Mars rover is a Spacecraft which propels itself across the surface of Mars after landing.
See also
- First person (video games)
- Spasim (1974)
External links
- The DigiBarn Computer Museum's Maze War 30 Year Retrospective: "The First First-person Shooter" (Contains additional text and images that include screenshots)
- Image of Maze War on a Xerox Alto
- Ad and press release for MacroMind MazeWars+
Dapyx Software network: MP3 Explorer | Ebook Manager | Zenithic