Maze War

Maze is a multiplayer first-person shooter 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 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.

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 NASA Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley, California. The trio were working on creating graphical representations of computational fluid dynamics on Imlac PDS-1 minicomputers, which unlike many other minicomputers at the time included a vector graphics monitor. 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.

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; prior confusion over the development timeline of the game has led to it being considered, along with Spasim, 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 in 1991 without direct inspiration from Maze.

The Xerox version of the game was adapted by Christopher Kent for the X Window System 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 released a version of the game for the Apple Macintosh titled Maze Wars+, which was playable on the AppleTalk 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.