''Maze'', also known as ''Maze War'', is a 3D multiplayer

first-person shooter A first-person shooter (FPS) is a video game genre, video game centered on gun fighting and other weapon-based combat seen from a First person (video games), first-person perspective, with the player experiencing the action directly through t ...

maze game originally developed in 1973 and expanded in 1974. The first version was developed by high school students Steve Colley, Greg Thompson, and Howard Palmer for the Imlac PDS-1

minicomputer A minicomputer, or colloquially mini, is a type of general-purpose computer mostly developed from the mid-1960s, built significantly smaller and sold at a much lower price than mainframe computers . By 21st century-standards however, a mini is ...

during a school work/study program at the

NASA The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA ) is an independent agencies of the United States government, independent agency of the federal government of the United States, US federal government responsible for the United States ...

Ames Research Center The Ames Research Center (ARC), also known as NASA Ames, is a major NASA research center at Moffett Federal Airfield in California's Silicon Valley. It was founded in 1939 as the second National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) laborat ...

. By the end of 1973 the game featured shooting elements and could be played on two computers connected together. After Thompson began school at the

Massachusetts Institute of Technology The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a Private university, private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Established in 1861, MIT has played a significant role in the development of many areas of moder ...

(MIT), he brought the game to the school's computer science laboratory in February 1974, where he and Dave Lebling expanded it into an eight-player game using the school's

Digital Equipment Corporation Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC ), using the trademark Digital, was a major American company in the computer industry from the 1960s to the 1990s. The company was co-founded by Ken Olsen and Harlan Anderson in 1957. Olsen was president until ...

PDP-10 Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC)'s PDP-10, later marketed as the DECsystem-10, is a mainframe computer family manufactured beginning in 1966 and discontinued in 1983. 1970s models and beyond were marketed under the DECsystem-10 name, especi ...

mainframe computer A mainframe computer, informally called a mainframe or big iron, is a computer used primarily by large organizations for critical applications like bulk data processing for tasks such as censuses, industry and consumer statistics, enterprise ...

and PDS-1 terminals along with adding scoring, top-down map views, and a level editor. Other programmers at MIT improved this version of the game, which was also playable between people at different universities over the nascent

ARPANET The Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) was the first wide-area packet-switched network with distributed control and one of the first computer networks to implement the TCP/IP protocol suite. Both technologies became the tec ...

. Due to the popularity of the game, laboratory managers at MIT both played it while also trying to restrict its use due to the large amount of time students were spending on it. There are reports that the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (

DARPA The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is a research and development agency of the United States Department of Defense responsible for the development of emerging technologies for use by the military. Originally known as the Adva ...

) at one point banned the game from the ARPANET due to its popularity. Thompson and other programmers later developed several other versions of ''Maze'', including a specialized hardware-based game by Thompson and other students as well as a version titled ''Mazewar'' by Jim Guyton, Mike Wahrman, and colleagues at

Xerox Xerox Holdings Corporation (, ) is an American corporation that sells print and electronic document, digital document products and services in more than 160 countries. Xerox was the pioneer of the photocopier market, beginning with the introduc ...

for the

Xerox Alto The Xerox Alto is a computer system developed at Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center) in the 1970s. It is considered one of the first workstations or personal computers, and its development pioneered many aspects of modern computing. It featu ...

computer. The Xerox version went on to inspire many different takes on the first-person maze game concept in the 1980s and 1990s, released under many different names. ''Maze'' is believed to be the first 3D first-person game ever made. It is likely also the earliest example of what was later termed the

genre and is considered along with the 1974 space flight simulation game ''

Spasim ''Spasim'' is a 32-player 3D networked space flight simulation game and first-person space shooter developed by Jim Bowery for the PLATO computer network and released in March 1974. The game features four teams of eight players, each controll ...

'' to be one of the "joint ancestors" of the genre. It has additionally been credited with a variety of other firsts, such as the first level editor, first observer mode and radar, and first avatars, but due to its reliance on specific, expensive computer hardware its direct influence on video games and the first-person shooter genre was limited.

Gameplay

''Maze'' is a multiplayer

maze game in which players traverse a flat maze and shoot opponents to score points. The maze layout is represented by a grid of spaces that are either empty or solid and form a flat plane containing walls of equal height. The game contains a default maze layout, but players can provide their own upon starting the game. The player can move forward and backwards between spaces at a rate of one space per key press and can turn left or right or look behind themselves in 90-degree increments. They can also peek around corners, which changes their view as if they had both moved forward and turned, but does not move their

player character A player character (also known as a playable character or PC) is a fictional Character (arts), character in a video game or tabletop role-playing game whose actions are controlled by a player rather than the rules of the game. The characters tha ...

or allow them to shoot. Other players in the maze are displayed as the letters of their usernames along with an indicator of which direction they are looking; later versions of the game replaced this with the image of an eyeball. Players can also send text messages that are displayed on the screens of other players. Players can shoot bullets, which rapidly move away from the player and hit other players upon touching them; shooting a player earns the shooter ten points, while being shot loses the target five points. After being shot, the target has two seconds to move away before they can be shot again. The players' scores are displayed next to the view of the maze. Early versions of the game let the player overlay the screen with a top-down view of the maze and their

avatar Avatar (, ; ) is a concept within Hinduism that in Sanskrit literally means . It signifies the material appearance or incarnation of a powerful deity, or spirit on Earth. The relative verb to "alight, to make one's appearance" is sometimes u ...

's position in it, while later versions kept the top-down view next to or below the viewscreen at all times. Different versions of the game support different numbers of players; the initial concept only supported two players, while the first main version of the game supported eight players at different terminals, and later variants supported more. In addition to human players, "robot" players can be added to the game, which follow simple algorithms to play the game and slow down if they reach a score limit.

Development

Maze

The original version of the game was developed by high school students Steve Colley, Howard Palmer, and Greg Thompson in mid to late 1973 during a school work/study program at the

Silicon Valley Silicon Valley is a region in Northern California that is a global center for high technology and innovation. Located in the southern part of the San Francisco Bay Area, it corresponds roughly to the geographical area of the Santa Clara Valley ...

, California. The trio were working on creating graphical representations of

computational fluid dynamics Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) is a branch of fluid mechanics that uses numerical analysis and data structures to analyze and solve problems that involve fluid dynamics, fluid flows. Computers are used to perform the calculations required ...

on Imlac PDS-1

s, which unlike many other minicomputers at the time included a

vector graphics Vector graphics are a form of computer graphics in which visual images are created directly from geometric shapes defined on a Cartesian plane, such as points, lines, curves and polygons. The associated mechanisms may include vector displ ...

monitor Monitor or monitor may refer to: Places * Monitor, Alberta * Monitor, Indiana, town in the United States * Monitor, Kentucky * Monitor, Oregon, unincorporated community in the United States * Monitor, Washington * Monitor, Logan County, Wes ...

. Colley was developing a method of determining which vertices of a three-dimensional object would not be visible to a viewer and then not drawing them on the screen, thereby displaying a 3D model that looked solid rather than see-through. Colley created a program that could rotate a solid-seeming cube on the screen, and the trio considered how to make a fun program with it, as students at the lab, including Thompson, had previously created versions of arcade games on the computers. Palmer suggested creating a maze that the user could move through, which he and Colley agreed could work if it was a flat maze composed of cubes where the player's view could only be at 90 degree angles. Colley came back to the other two the next day with the basic ''Maze'' program, wherein the player had a goal of traversing the maze to its exit. Palmer and Thompson expanded the game to support two players at once using two PDS-1s linked together with a serial cable, and then added the ability for the two players to shoot one another. Colley added the ability to "peek" around corners without moving because he felt it was too easy to be shot while trying to move and then turn. By the end of 1973, all three developers had left NASA to go to college, and they took the ''Maze'' program with them. Thompson went to the

(MIT) beginning in the fall of 1973, while Colley and Palmer went to

California Institute of Technology The California Institute of Technology (branded as Caltech) is a private research university in Pasadena, California, United States. The university is responsible for many modern scientific advancements and is among a small group of institutes ...

and

Stanford University Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University, is a Private university, private research university in Stanford, California, United States. It was founded in 1885 by railroad magnate Leland Stanford (the eighth ...

, respectively, at the start of 1974. The game has been inconsistently named both ''Maze'' and ''Maze War'': while Thompson and Colley, writing in a 2004 retrospective, refer to it as ''Maze''; Palmer refers to it as ''Maze War''. Later versions of the game also use both names inconsistently, although the PDS-1 source code titles itself "Maze". LCM - DEC PDP-10 - 02

At MIT, Thompson became involved in computer modeling of dynamic systems at MIT's Project MAC (now the

MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) is a research institute at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) formed by the 2003 merger of the Laboratory for Computer Science (LCS) and the Artificial Intelligence Lab ...

), which featured a

(DEC)

networked to eight less-powerful PDS-1s for use as graphical terminals. Thompson brought paper tapes of code for several programs from NASA Ames to MIT in February 1974, including ''Maze''. He and co-worker Dave Lebling decided to recreate and expand the game on the Project MAC computer system. Although Lebling does not recall shooting in the version of the game Thompson showed him, it was soon re-added as the pair greatly expanded the game. The new version of the game used the PDP-10 as a centralized server and supported up to eight players or computer-controlled figures in a maze at once, which was now a 16 by 32 grid. Thompson worked on the PDS-1 code that allowed for more players, the visuals for the bullets, the score-keeping, the ability to see a top-down view of the maze, and a cheat command to move through walls. Lebling, meanwhile, wrote the PDP-10 code to connect all of the players and allow text messaging between terminals, a simple "robot" player that could play the game if there were not enough human players, and a program for players to create their own maze layouts. When he discovered that the robot players were too difficult for some players, he altered the robot players to move slower once they scored a certain number of points. Players were represented in the maze as their three-letter user id, along with an arrow pointing which way they were facing. The game was popular around the lab as well as with other MIT students, who would make accounts on the system just to play ''Maze''. As users had to reserve time on the terminals due to the limited availability, some players would go to the lab in the middle of the night in order to play the game. According to Lebling, ''Maze'' was played almost constantly outside of the primary lab hours. Once Thompson and Lebling converted the game to the PDP-10, other programmers further developed the ''Maze'' code. Ken Harrenstien and Charles Frankston rewrote portions of the game to use fewer resources so that the PDP-10 could run more than one instance of the game at the same time. Another researcher, Tak To, wrote a "Maze Watcher" program that ran on an

Evans & Sutherland Evans & Sutherland is an American computer graphics firm founded in 1968 by David C. Evans (computer scientist), David Evans and Ivan Sutherland. Its current products are used in digital projection environments like planetariums. Its simulation b ...

LDS-1 terminal and would display a top-down view of the maze and players in a ''Maze'' game for onlookers. Although lab director

J. C. R. Licklider Joseph Carl Robnett Licklider (; March 11, 1915 – June 26, 1990), known simply as J. C. R. or "Lick", was an American psychologistMiller, G. A. (1991), "J. C. R. Licklider, psychologist", ''Journal of the Acoustical Society of Am ...

and assistant director Al Vezza also played the game, as the lab was funded for serious purposes by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (

) they attempted to limit use of the program. At Vezza's request, Lebling created a "Maze Guncher" program that would run in the background and crash any running ''Maze'' games, leading to a continual back and forth as players found ways to avoid the program—or simply turn it off, as the system had no security mechanism to prevent it. Project MAC was part of the nascent

, the precursor to the

Internet The Internet (or internet) is the Global network, global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a internetworking, network of networks ...

, which connected several research institutions around America. Many of these institutions owned PDS-1 terminals, and ''Maze'' spread to them as well, allowing multiplayer games across the ARPANET. According to Lebling, the first multiplayer game between institutions was between students at MIT and the

University of California, Santa Cruz The University of California, Santa Cruz (UC Santa Cruz or UCSC) is a public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Santa Cruz, California, United States. It is one of the ten campuses in the University of C ...

, although the slow speed of the network left the non-MIT players at a disadvantage. The code for the game was adjusted by Harrenstien and Frankston to account for the extra

network delay Network delay is a design and performance characteristic of a telecommunications network. It specifies the latency for a bit of data to travel across the network from one communication endpoint to another. It is typically measured in multiple ...

these cross-country games incurred. ''Maze'' was particularly popular at the

University of Southern California The University of Southern California (USC, SC, or Southern Cal) is a Private university, private research university in Los Angeles, California, United States. Founded in 1880 by Robert M. Widney, it is the oldest private research university in ...

and Stanford: it was later reported that at one point DARPA banned it from the network as half of the communication traffic between Stanford and MIT was for the game.

The Maze Game and Mazewar

Programmers have created several variants of the original ''Maze'' game. The first was partially developed by Thompson himself; in the fall of 1976 he took an electrical engineering

digital electronics Digital electronics is a field of electronics involving the study of digital signals and the engineering of devices that use or produce them. It deals with the relationship between Binary number, binary inputs and outputs by passing electrical s ...

design class, in which he had to do a group project with Mark Horowitz and George Woltman. For the project, they created a hardware system that could run ''Maze'' titled "The Maze Game"; Thompson designed the computer hardware, Woltman wrote the software, and Horowitz created the display system. In this version, the maze was a 16 by 16 by 16 cube with no gravity in which the player could move up and down just as they did forward and back, as they found it easier to create hardware that did not need to treat the floor and ceiling differently than other sides. Woltman added robot players like in the computer version of the game, but the trio discovered that since humans found it difficult to visualize where they were in the multi-level maze, the robot players were much harder to beat despite their simple algorithm. They made the difficulty adjustable in response by letting the player adjust the hardware speed, in turn making the robots react slower. As the hardware could not use a computer monitor, the team used

oscilloscope An oscilloscope (formerly known as an oscillograph, informally scope or O-scope) is a type of electronic test instrument that graphically displays varying voltages of one or more signals as a function of time. Their main purpose is capturing i ...

s that Horowitz made act as vector displays. After the class, the game remained as an example for future students for several years. Xerox Alto mit Rechner

In 1977, Jim Guyton, a staff member at

's Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), and Mike Wahrman, who worked at

RAND Corporation The RAND Corporation, doing business as RAND, is an American nonprofit global policy think tank, research institute, and public sector consulting firm. RAND engages in research and development (R&D) in several fields and industries. Since the ...

, rewrote ''Maze'' for

computers, which could communicate with each other directly using the nascent

ethernet Ethernet ( ) is a family of wired computer networking technologies commonly used in local area networks (LAN), metropolitan area networks (MAN) and wide area networks (WAN). It was commercially introduced in 1980 and first standardized in 198 ...

networking protocol. Wahrman had played the game at MIT in 1976 while he and Guyton worked at

, which he enthusiastically described to Guyton using the name "Mazewar". After Guyton moved to Xerox, the pair felt that the game would be suited to the Alto and could be improved on there, and Wahrman got copies of the PDP-10 and PDS-1 code. The pair spent the next year working on the game, which has been inconsistently remembered as ''Mazewar'', ''MazeWar'', ''Maze War'', and ''Maze Wars''. They adapted the graphics from the vector displays of the PDS-1 to the

raster file:Rgb-raster-image.svg, upright=1, The Smiley, smiley face in the top left corner is a raster image. When enlarged, individual pixels appear as squares. Enlarging further, each pixel can be analyzed, with their colors constructed through comb ...

displays of the Alto, added the top-down display of the maze and the player's position in it to always be below the first-person view, and changed the networking code to handle multiple systems talking directly to each other without a central PDP-10 server. They rewrote the game entirely in the

Mesa A mesa is an isolated, flat-topped elevation, ridge, or hill, bounded from all sides by steep escarpments and standing distinctly above a surrounding plain. Mesas consist of flat-lying soft sedimentary rocks, such as shales, capped by a ...

programming language and were assisted by several other Xerox employees, including Steven Hayes, Bill Verplank, Jim Sandman, and Bruce Malasky. The text representation of other players was replaced with a large eyeball drawn by Verplank. The game was an immediate hit around the office, and within a few weeks it had spread to other Xerox locations. Eventually, it migrated to MIT, Stanford, and

Carnegie Mellon University Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) is a private research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States. The institution was established in 1900 by Andrew Carnegie as the Carnegie Technical Schools. In 1912, it became the Carnegie Institu ...

, which were some of the few non-Xerox locations that owned Xerox Alto computers. Guyton maintained the game for another six months before leaving Xerox for RAND. In 1981, Xerox commercially released a modified version of the Alto as the

Xerox Star The Xerox Star workstation, officially named Xerox Star 8010 Information System, is the first commercial personal computer to incorporate technologies that have since become standard in personal computers, including a bitmapped display, a window- ...

, and the source code to ''Mazewar'' proliferated after it, in turn inspiring further versions of ''Maze''.

Legacy

''Maze'' is believed to be the first 3D first-person game ever made. It is likely also the earliest example of what was later termed the

genre; prior confusion over the development timeline of the game has led to it being considered, along with ''

'', an early 1974 space flight simulation game by Jim Bowery, to be one of the "joint ancestors" of the genre. It has additionally been credited with a variety of other firsts, such as level editing due to Lebling's editor, observer mode and radar from the top-down view, and avatars from the representation of other players. Despite its number of firsts, the limited availability of the game due to its reliance on specific, expensive computer hardware meant that it was not a large influence on video games or on the modern first-person shooter genre, which is generally held to have started with ''

Catacomb 3-D ''Catacomb 3-D'' (also known as ''Catacomb 3-D: A New Dimension'', ''Catacomb 3-D: The Descent'', and ''Catacombs 3'') is a first-person shooter video game, the third in the '' Catacomb'' series, the first of which to feature 3D computer graphic ...

'' in 1991 without direct inspiration from ''Maze''. The Xerox version of the game was adapted by Christopher Kent for the

X Window System The X Window System (X11, or simply X) is a windowing system for bitmap displays, common on Unix-like operating systems. X originated as part of Project Athena at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1984. The X protocol has been at ...

at DEC in 1986 as ''X MazeWars''. This version was based directly on the Xerox source code, which Kent, who had first been shown the game at RAND by Guyton, received from a former Xerox employee. In 1987,

MacroMind MacroMind was an Apple Macintosh software company founded in Chicago in 1984 by Marc Canter, Jamie Fenton and Mark Stephen Pierce. The company's first product was SoundVision, a combined music and graphics editor. Before the release, the graphic ...

released a version of the game for the

Apple An apple is a round, edible fruit produced by an apple tree (''Malus'' spp.). Fruit trees of the orchard or domestic apple (''Malus domestica''), the most widely grown in the genus, are agriculture, cultivated worldwide. The tree originated ...

Macintosh Mac is a brand of personal computers designed and marketed by Apple Inc., Apple since 1984. The name is short for Macintosh (its official name until 1999), a reference to the McIntosh (apple), McIntosh apple. The current product lineup inclu ...

titled ''Maze Wars+'', which was playable on the

AppleTalk AppleTalk is a discontinued proprietary suite of networking protocols developed by Apple Computer for their Macintosh computers. AppleTalk includes a number of features that allow local area networks to be connected with no prior setup or the ...

local network by up to 30 players. The game featured five different character avatars, including an eyeball similar to that found in the Xerox version of the game, four different types of robot players, additional maze features such as teleporters, and walls made of lines rather than blocks. Advertisements for the game referred to it as "a direct descendant of the well known M.I.T. and Xerox PARC network classics" and at one point listed it as for sale directly by MacroMind for US$49.95. It was followed by ''Super MazeWars'' by Callisto for

Mac OS Mac operating systems were developed by Apple Inc. in a succession of two major series. In 1984, Apple debuted the operating system that is now known as the classic Mac OS with its release of the original Macintosh System Software. The system ...

in 1992, which was bundled with Macintosh computers for a time. Several other games based on the ''Maze'' concept, with a variety of graphical styles and differences from the original versions, were released in the 1980s and 1990s. These include ''

MIDI Maze ''MIDI Maze'', also known as ''Faceball 2000'', is a networked first-person shooter maze video game for the Atari ST developed by Xanth Software F/X and released in 1987 by Hybrid Arts. The game takes place in a maze of untextured walls. The worl ...

'' for the

Atari ST Atari ST is a line of personal computers from Atari Corporation and the successor to the company's Atari 8-bit computers, 8-bit computers. The initial model, the Atari 520ST, had limited release in April–June 1985, and was widely available i ...

by Xanth Software in 1987, which was ported as ''Faceball 2000'' to the

Game Boy The is a handheld game console developed by Nintendo, launched in the Japanese home market on April 21, 1989, followed by North America later that year and other territories from 1990 onwards. Following the success of the Game & Watch single-ga ...

Super Nintendo Entertainment System The Super Nintendo Entertainment System, commonly shortened to Super Nintendo, Super NES or SNES, is a Fourth generation of video game consoles, 16-bit home video game console developed by Nintendo that was released in 1990 in Japan, 1991 in No ...

, and

Game Gear The is an 8-bit Fourth generation of video game consoles, fourth-generation handheld game console released by Sega on October 6, 1990 in Japan, in April 1991 throughout North America and Europe, and in 1992 in Australia. The Game Gear primarily ...

; ''Oracle Maze'', a demo application at the Interop 92 conference to demonstrate

Oracle An oracle is a person or thing considered to provide insight, wise counsel or prophetic predictions, most notably including precognition of the future, inspired by deities. If done through occultic means, it is a form of divination. Descript ...

's networking technology connecting many different companies' computers; ''MazeWars'' for

NeXTSTEP NeXTSTEP is a discontinued object-oriented, multitasking operating system based on the Mach kernel and the UNIX-derived BSD. It was developed by NeXT, founded by Steve Jobs, in the late 1980s and early 1990s and was initially used for its ...

by Mike Kienenberger in 1994, and ''MazeWars'' for

Palm OS Palm OS (also known as Garnet OS) is a discontinued mobile operating system initially developed by Palm, Inc., for personal digital assistants (PDAs) in 1996. Palm OS was designed for ease of use with a touchscreen-based graphical user interface. ...

by IndiVideo in 1998.

Notes

References

{{reflist, refs= {{cite conference , url=https://www.digibarn.com/collections/presentations/maze-war/index_files/frame.html , title=The aMazing History of Maze , last1=Thompson , first1=Greg , date=November 7, 2004 , publisher=

DigiBarn Computer Museum The DigiBarn Computer Museum, or simply DigiBarn, is a computer history museum in Boulder Creek, California, United States. The museum is housed in a 90-year-old barn constructed from old-growth Redwood in the Santa Cruz Mountains, which is adja ...

, location=

Mountain View, California Mountain View is a city in Santa Clara County, California, United States, part of the San Francisco Bay Area. Named for its views of the Santa Cruz Mountains, the population was 82,376 at the 2020 United States census, 2020 census. Mountain V ...

, conference=

Computer History Museum The Computer History Museum (CHM) is a computer museum in Mountain View, California. The museum presents stories and artifacts of Silicon Valley and the Information Age, and explores the Digital Revolution, computing revolution and its impact ...

Vintage Computer Festival 7.0 , access-date=May 31, 2022 , archive-date=July 17, 2021 , archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20210717082417/https://www.digibarn.com/collections/presentations/maze-war/index_files/frame.html , url-status=live {{cite magazine , last=Handy , first=Alex , pages=45–47 , date=July 2005 , issue=176 , magazine=

Computer Games Magazine ''Computer Games Magazine'' was a monthly computer and console gaming print magazine, founded in October 1988 as the United Kingdom publication ''Games International''. During its history, it was known variously as ''Strategy Plus'' (October 1 ...

, title=The First First-person Shooter , publisher= theGlobe.com , issn=1546-5101 {{cite web , url=https://www.polygon.com/features/2015/5/21/8627231/the-first-first-person-shooter , title=The first first-person shooter , last=Moss , first=Richard , website=

Polygon In geometry, a polygon () is a plane figure made up of line segments connected to form a closed polygonal chain. The segments of a closed polygonal chain are called its '' edges'' or ''sides''. The points where two edges meet are the polygon ...

, date=May 21, 2015 , access-date=June 17, 2020 , url-status=live , archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20200617135233/https://www.polygon.com/features/2015/5/21/8627231/the-first-first-person-shooter , archive-date=June 17, 2020 {{cite web , title=Steve Colley's accounting of the beginning of Maze (and other history and thoughts) , url=https://www.digibarn.com/history/04-VCF7-MazeWar/stories/colley.html , last=Colley , first=Steve , website=Stories from the Maze War 30 Year Retrospective , publisher=

, date=November 2004 , access-date=May 30, 2022 , archive-date=May 11, 2022 , archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20220511041112/https://www.digibarn.com/history/04-VCF7-MazeWar/stories/colley.html , url-status=live {{cite web , title=Howard Palmer reports the True Early History of Maze War! , url=https://www.digibarn.com/collections/games/xerox-maze-war/index.html#palmer , last=Palmer , first=Howard , website=The Maze War 30 Year Retrospective at the DigiBarn , publisher=

, date=November 2004 , access-date=May 30, 2022 , archive-date=November 15, 2020 , archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20201115154532/http://www.digibarn.com/collections/games/xerox-maze-war/index.html#palmer , url-status=live {{cite book , last=Waldrop , first=M. Mitchell , title=The Dream Machine , pages=308–309 , year=2018 , publisher=Stripe Press , isbn=978-1-73226-511-0 {{cite web , title=David Lebling's Story of Maze at MIT (1974+) , url=https://www.digibarn.com/history/04-VCF7-MazeWar/stories/lebling.html , last=Lebling , first=Dave , author-link=Dave Lebling , website=Stories from the Maze War 30 Year Retrospective , publisher=

, date=November 2004 , access-date=May 30, 2022 , archive-date=February 23, 2022 , archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20220223214843/https://www.digibarn.com/history/04-VCF7-MazeWar/stories/lebling.html , url-status=live {{cite web , title=Jim Guyton's Story of Maze at Xerox (Alto and Star) , url=https://www.digibarn.com/history/04-VCF7-MazeWar/stories/guyton.html , last=Guyton , first=Jim , website=Stories from the Maze War 30 Year Retrospective , publisher=

, date=November 2004 , access-date=May 30, 2022 , archive-date=February 23, 2022 , archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20220223214835/https://www.digibarn.com/history/04-VCF7-MazeWar/stories/guyton.html , url-status=live {{cite web , title=A History and Analysis of Level Design in 3D Computer Games , last=Shahrani , first=Sam , url=http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/2674/educational_feature_a_history_and_.php , work=

Gamasutra ''Game Developer'' (known as ''Gamasutra'' until 2021) is a website created in 1997 that focuses on aspects of video game development. It is owned and operated by Informa TechTarget and acted as the online sister publication to the print maga ...

, publisher= UBM , date=April 5, 2006 , access-date=September 5, 2017 , url-status=dead , archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20121202085904/http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/2674/educational_feature_a_history_and_.php , archive-date=December 2, 2012 {{cite web , title=The Complete History Of First-Person Shooters , url=https://www.pcmag.com/news/the-complete-history-of-first-person-shooters , last=Jensen , first=K. Thor , date=October 11, 2017 , website=

PC Gamer ''PC Gamer'' is a magazine and website founded in the United Kingdom in 1993 devoted to PC gaming and published monthly by Future plc. The magazine has several regional editions, with the UK and US editions becoming the best selling PC games m ...

, publisher=

Future The future is the time after the past and present. Its arrival is considered inevitable due to the existence of time and the laws of physics. Due to the apparent nature of reality and the unavoidability of the future, everything that currently ex ...

, access-date=May 31, 2022 , archive-date=June 12, 2020 , archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20200612062316/https://www.pcmag.com/news/the-complete-history-of-first-person-shooters , url-status=live {{cite web , url=https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2016/02/headshot-a-visual-history-of-first-person-shooters/ , title=Headshot: A visual history of first-person shooters , last=Moss , first=Richard , publisher=

Ars Technica ''Ars Technica'' is a website covering news and opinions in technology, science, politics, and society, created by Ken Fisher and Jon Stokes in 1998. It publishes news, reviews, and guides on issues such as computer hardware and software, sci ...

, date=February 14, 2016 , access-date=October 14, 2017 , quote=Jim Bowery's 32-player, 3D networked, first-person perspective space shooter ''Spasim''—a kind of forebear to space combat sims ''Star Wars: X-Wing'' and ''Elite''—got its first release on the PLATO computer around this time as well, effectively making ''Maze'' and ''Spasim'' joint ancestors of the FPS genre. , url-status=live , archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20171015044747/https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2016/02/headshot-a-visual-history-of-first-person-shooters/ , archive-date=October 15, 2017 {{cite web , url=http://www.usgamer.net/articles/blast-from-the-past-the-dawn-of-the-first-person-shooter , title=Blast from the Past: The Dawn of the First-Person Shooter , last=Davison , first=Pete , publisher=

USGamer Gamer Network Limited (formerly Eurogamer Network Limited) is a British digital media company based in London. Founded in 1999 by Rupert and Nick Loman, it owns brands—primarily editorial websites—relating to video game journalism and ot ...

, date=July 17, 2013 , access-date=October 14, 2017 , quote=There's some debate over exactly what the first ever first-person perspective video game was, but it's either ''Maze War'', an early example of a maze-based "deathmatch", and a game which pioneered the "flick-screen" grid-based movement that would be seen in classic dungeon crawlers such as ''Wizardry'' and ''Eye of the Beholder'' for many years afterwards; or ''Spasim'', a space combat game which purports to be the first ever 3D multiplayer title. , url-status=dead , archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20171015044409/http://www.usgamer.net/articles/blast-from-the-past-the-dawn-of-the-first-person-shooter , archive-date=October 15, 2017 {{cite book , last=Wolf , first=Mark J. P. , chapter=BattleZone and the Origins of First-Person Shooting Games , editor-last1=Voorhees , editor-first1=Gerald A. , editor-last2=Call , editor-first2=Joshua , editor-last3=Whitlock , editor-first3=Katie , title=Guns, Grenades, and Grunts: First-Person Shooter Games , publisher=

Bloomsbury Publishing Bloomsbury Publishing plc is a British worldwide publishing house of fiction and non-fiction. Bloomsbury's head office is located on Bedford Square in Bloomsbury, an area of the London Borough of Camden. It has a US publishing office located in ...

, date=November 2, 2012 , isbn=978-1-4411-9144-1 {{cite web , url=https://www.engadget.com/2012/06/12/the-game-archaeologist-maze-war/ , last=Olivetti , first=Justin , date=June 12, 2012 , title=The Game Archaeologist: Maze War , website=

Engadget Engadget ( ) is a technology news, reviews and analysis website offering daily coverage of gadgets, consumer electronics, video games, gaming hardware, apps, social media, streaming, AI, space, robotics, electric vehicles and other potentially ...

, publisher=

Yahoo Yahoo (, styled yahoo''!'' in its logo) is an American web portal that provides the search engine Yahoo Search and related services including My Yahoo, Yahoo Mail, Yahoo News, Yahoo Finance, Yahoo Sports, y!entertainment, yahoo!life, an ...

, access-date=May 30, 2022 , archive-date=May 6, 2018 , archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20180506045343/https://www.engadget.com/2012/06/12/the-game-archaeologist-maze-war/ , url-status=live {{cite book , last=Barton , first=Matt , title=Vintage Games 2.0 , date=2019 , publisher=

CRC Press The CRC Press, LLC is an American publishing group that specializes in producing technical books. Many of their books relate to engineering, science and mathematics. Their scope also includes books on business, forensics and information technol ...

, isbn=978-1-00-000092-4 , pages=47–51 {{cite book , url=https://www.digibarn.com/collections/games/maze-war/macromind-mazewars/MacroMind%20MazeWars%20Mac%202a.jpg , date=1987 , title=Maze Wars+ advertisement , publisher=

, access-date=May 31, 2022 , archive-date=January 21, 2022 , archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20220121085847/https://www.digibarn.com/collections/games/maze-war/macromind-mazewars/MacroMind%20MazeWars%20Mac%202a.jpg , url-status=live

External links

* Imlac PDS-1
Assembler source
an
listing
for the MIT version of ''Maze'', as of April 1974
Class report
for "The Maze Game" hardware design project
Imlac Maze War Video
of ''Maze'' gameplay by Tom Uban at the

Video
of Xerox Alto version of ''Maze War'' used as evidence of prior art in later copyright court case
PDF
of presentation given by Greg Thompson at the

November 2004 1973 video games First-person shooters Mainframe games First-person maze games Multiplayer online games Public-domain software with source code Video games developed in the United States