Maze War
Maze War played on an Imlac PDS-1D at the Computer History Museum event.
Developer(s)	Steve Colley, Greg Thompson, others
Platform(s)	Imlac PDS-1, Macintosh, NeXT Computer, Palm OS, Xerox Star, X Window System
Release
Genre(s)	First-person shooter Maze
Mode(s)	Single player, multiplayer

Number Maze Game
Number Maze Mac Game Online Game

Maze, later expanded and renamed to Maze War, is a 3D networked first-person shootermaze game originally developed by Steve Colley, Greg Thompson, and Howard Palmer for the Imlac PDS-1 computer. It was largely developed between the summer of 1972 and fall of 1973, at which point it included shooter elements and soon after was playable over ARPANET between multiple universities. It is considered the earliest first-person shooter; ambiguity over its development timeline has led it to be considered, along with Spasim (March 1974, on PLATO), to be one of the 'joint ancestors' of the genre.

Although the first-person shooter genre did not crystallize for many years, Maze War influenced 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.

Naturally, the biggest number formed with 2 digits in our decimal system is of course 99. Talk To Me Like I'm A 3 Year Old Version: The game can't handle numbers bigger than 255. Anyways, if you get to level 256 the data can't handle it and funky things start to happen. NumberMaze is an educational game where players get to practice their math skills. The game consists of a number of mazes that the player has to navigate his way through to get to a castle. Viewed from a top down perspective the player moves his character by clicking with the mouse. The mazes have many doorways that the player has to go through.

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 around corners through doorways. The game also uses simple tile-based movement, where the player moves from square to square. Other players are seen as their names, figures or later eyeballs in the Xerox version. When a player sees another player, they can shoot or otherwise 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' positions on the map. The original MIT Imlac version had cheat keys to knock out a wall in the player's local Imlac maze copy, which made it possible to walk through walls as seen by other players. Occasionally in later versions, a duck also appears in the passage.

Innovations[edit]

Features either invented for Maze War or disseminated by it include:

First-person 3-D perspective. 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. It also could be considered a very early virtual reality system.
Avatars. 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.
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. This version could be played across the ARPANET, in 1977.
Observer mode. In the 1974 and 1977 versions, a graphics terminal could be used by observers to watch the game in progress without participating.
Internet play. While not the first game to feature this, it certainly was a very early example running over the early Arpanet.
Modifying clients in order to cheat at the game.
Encrypting source code to prevent cheating.

Versions[edit]

1973, Imlacs at NASA[edit]

It was originally written by Steve Colley (later founder of nCUBE) in 1972–1973 on the Imlac PDS-1's at the NASAAmes 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, together with Greg Thompson, and Howard Palmer developed the MazeWars program at NASA in Jim Hart's Computation Division 2nd floor lab. 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.^[2]

1973, Imlacs at MIT[edit]

The original Imlac networked version was limited to two players, with the Imlacs directly cabled to each other. In the fall of 1973, Greg Thompson brought the game with him when he went away to college at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). There at J. C. R. Licklider's MIT Project MAC Dynamic Modelling Laboratory, Greg with Dave Lebling expanded Maze Wars into a full multiplayer game that could operate between Imlacs over the early ARPANET (the predecessor to the modern Internet). According to Lebling, the version of the game Thompson brought did not have shooting in it yet: 'you wandered around in a maze, and that was it.' In addition to the network connectivity, they added the shooting, and Lebling wrote a maze editor where players could create mazes with a text file of '1's for walls and '0's for spaces.^[3] As described in the history of interactive computing book The Dream Machine:

'Students would come from all over Tech Square to play, and would occasionally find themselves in a shootout with the director of Project MAC himself.'^[4]

The clients ran on Imlacs which had 56 kbit/s serial connections, allowing them to communicate with a PDP-10 computer running MIT's Incompatible Timesharing System (ITS). A server program on the mainframe coordinated up to eight Imlac clients playing against each other. By using terminal servers, Imlacs at other colleges that were connected to the ARPANET could connect to the server at MIT and play against players located across the United States. The server program would also implement robot players and drive a playing monitor that would display a top-down map of the maze showing the locations of human and robotic players on an Evans & Sutherland LDS-1 Line Drawing System. Later a level editor was written so that different playing fields could have different designs.

1976, TTL at MIT[edit]

For a class in the fall of 1976, Greg Thompson (computer design), Mark Horowitz (display processor) and George Woltman (firmware) built a 'hardware' version of Maze entirely from 7400 series TTL circu

Number Maze Mac Game Online