1982 · Starpath · Adventure · Puzzle

Escape from the Mindmaster

Atari exclusive

Are you smart (and fast) enough to escape from the maze of the MindMaster? Featuring realistic first-person graphics, four separate Multi Load segments, maze maps, real-time clock, Alien stalker, direction indicator, sliding force field obstacles, and more!

Released: 1982
Platforms: Atari 2600 Atari 7800 ColecoVision
Genres: Adventure Puzzle
Developers: Starpath
Publishers: —
Modes: Single-player
Perspective: First person
Themes: Action Science fiction
Country: United States
Languages: English

About

Escape from the Mindmaster is a 1982 maze video game developed and published by Starpath. The game was designed by Dennis Caswell. The game features the a first-person perspective as the navigate six mazes. The player must search the mazes avoiding the wandering creature the Alien Invader and the moving barriers. Their goal is to escape each of the six mazes by finding the differently shaped puzzle pegs and place them in their corresponding slots in as fast as time as possible.

The game was designed for the Atari 2600 video game console and is played through the Starpath Supercharger add-on. The hardware increased the potential memory for games for the system. Caswell said he did not recall how he came up with the idea for the Escape from the Mindmaster, but said that he wanted to make a game without any shooting gameplay mechanics and that programming the visuals were particularly difficult.

Keywords

maze

Media

The articlegameplay, story, development, reception

Story

In Escape From the Mindmaster, the player has been abducted from their home and finds them in a giant corridor with no obvious escape. It dawns on them that they are subject of an experiment that test their intelligence, coordination and reflexes.

Escape From the Mindmaster has been described as a first-person maze game.

Development

Escape from the Mindmaster was developed by Starpath, a company based in Santa Clara, California. It was created by Dennis Caswell. Caswell said he was hired by Starpath to develop Atari 2600 games as he had his own Apple II computer and they were impressed with his skills in the arcade game Crazy Climber (1980).

Escape From the Mindmaster was designed for use with Starpath's Supercharger add-on for the Atari 2600. The supercharger allows a game to contain up to 6,272 bytes of memory for screen display compares the 128 of regular Atari games. Escape from the Mindmaster was among the 12 games Starpath would release for the Supercharger. Caswell said he did not recall where he got the idea for the game, but said he was motivated by the idea of creating a video game that did not have any shooting gameplay. Caswell added that he was not against violent games, saying "One of the last games that I played all the way through before removing myself from the gaming world was Quake, and I played it with as much relish as the next bloodthirsty savage."

Reception

From contemporary reviews of the game, video game magazines Electronic Fun with Computers & Games, JoyStik and Video Games complimented the graphics. Dan Persons, of the latter magazine, specifically highlight that they convincingly gave the illusion of depth and perspective as well as moving through the corridors. Phil Wiswell, also of Video Games, praised the graphics but said that it led him to expect more in terms of gameplay.

Wiswell found that the game should have had more action gameplay to complement the graphics. Similar comments appeared in JoyStik and from Persons who said that "fans of action games may find Escape from the Mindmaster a little disappointing." Jim Clark in Videogaming and Computer Gaming Illustrated said the game was "highly recommended" and that it was "a welcome change of pace for maze games dominated with "chasing and gobbling" for years." Danny Goodman of Radio-Electronics echoed this, saying the game had "far more board variety than possible from any other existing ROM-based cartridge."