| Maze | |
|---|---|
&sq=Google&lang=en&file=File:Maze_war.jpg) MIT version of Maze on an Imlac PDS-1D at the Computer History Museum | |
| Developer(s) | Steve Colley, Greg Thompson, Howard Palmer (NASA version) Greg Thompson, Dave Lebling (MIT version) Jim Guyton, Mike Wahrman (Xerox version) |
| Platform(s) | Computer (Imlac PDS-1, PDP-10, Xerox Alto, Xerox Star) |
| Release | 1973 |
| Genre(s) | First-person shooter, maze |
| Mode(s) | Single-player, multiplayer |
Maze, also known as Maze War,[a] is a 3D multiplayer first-person shooter 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 during a school work/study program at the NASA Ames Research Center. 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 (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 PDP-10 mainframe computer 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. 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) 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 for the Xerox Alto 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 first-person shooter genre and is considered along with the 1974 space flight simulation game Spasim 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.
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