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Maze video games

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A Pac-Man clone running on a CDC 6600.

Maze game is a video game genre. These games involve a player navigating a maze. Some of these games, also called maze chase games, involve navigating a maze while under pursuit from other characters moving through the same maze. While the term first appeared in 1980, some of the earliest video games involved navigating a maze, such as Mouse in the Maze created in the 1950s. While some writers such as Mark J. Wolf described games like Pac-Man (1980) as combining maze games with "collecting" and "escaping" gameplay styles, Allison Gizzard suggested Wolf's definition made the maze its own non-entity as a genre and more of an element of other gameplay styles.

In the 1970s, early commercial maze games such as Gotcha (1973) by Atari were released to arcades and home consoles. Towards the late 1970s, maze games began to have broader goals. Games such as Slot Racers (1978), Head On (1979) and Heiankyo Alien (1979) included gameplay beyond basic maze navigation such as collecting items and avoiding other maze dwellers.

Namco's Pac-Man (1980) was described by Steven Malliet and Gust De Meyere in Handbook of Computer Game Studies (2005) as "the perfection" of the maze game genre.[1] In the early 1980s, various sequels to Pac-Man, games that expanded upon its gameplay, and various video game clones of the original game were released. While some Pac-Man games delved into other genres such as the platformer Pac-Land (1984), mazes games began to appear less frequently as elements such as 3D environments and side-scrolling became more prominent in video games. Some later releases would still retain the core gameplay of the genre, such as the various Pac-Man sequels including Pac-Mania (1987) and Pac-Man Championship Edition (2007).

Etymology and characteristics

In 1980, due to the economic pressure of the gaming industry, video games began being categorized by genres that shared narrative structure, gameplay mechanics, and other schematics. One of the first video game genre classifications was by Chris Crawford who described "skill-and-action games", which included racing games and maze games.[2] The maze game became a common generic label in the early 1980s. It was associated with arcade games such as Namco's Pac-Man (1980), but also with textual and graphic adventure games where players had where players had to find their way in labyrinthine spaces.[3] Electronic Games classified maze games into three types: maze chases such as Pac-Man, maze shoot-outs such as Berzerk (1980), and maze explorations such as Tutankham (1982).[4] Other publications such as Computer Gaming World also used the term "maze chase" for Pac-Man like games.[5]

Mark J. P. Wolf described the maze game genre in his book The Medium of the Video Game (2001). He defined it as a game where the objective requires a player to successfully navigate a maze.[6] He added that the player-character in these games often, but not always, have to navigate a maze under the pressure of pursuers.[7]

Wolf's examples of what could qualify as a maze game included Pac-Man (1980), Mouse Trap (1981), and K.C. Munchkin! (1981) which were also combined with "collecting" and "escaping" gameplay".[7] Mike Bevan of Retro Gamer magazine described the types of maze games that had pursuers as "maze chase" games.[8] Bevan would also describe other styles such as "maze shooter" or "corridor shooters" where the player was usually in a top-down-perspective of a maze environment equipped with a weapon to defend themself.[8]

Alison Gazzard critiqued Wolf's definition, describing it as too broad, specifically when he said it could be combined with other genres such as shoot 'em up and adventure games. She continued that Wolf's definition would make the maze be an element of many game types instead of its own entity.[9]

History

Early mazes in video games

The idea of creating a maze as an environment for a video game began at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the late 1950s. In 1956, Claude Shannon joined MIT's Research Laboratory of Electronic and created Theseus, a mechanical roving mouse who shared the name of Theseus the mythical slayer of the minotaur in his labyrinth.[8] Shannon's creation influenced two grad students, Douglas T. Ross and John Ward to write Mouse in the Maze, a program for MIT's TX-0 computer. It was a digitized version of Shannon's Theseus, which allowed users to draw a maze on the system's Cathode ray tube (CRT) screen with a light pen. It featured a small "blip" representing a mouse to navigate to other dots on the screen which represented a wedge of cheese.[10]

MIT version of Maze on an Imlac PDS-1D at the Computer History Museum.

Prior to 1978, maze games were generally about navigating a character through a labyrinth or chasing another through one.[11][12] Early 1970s video games in the genre include the two-player game Cat and Mouse (1972) for the Magnavox Odyssey. The game involved a transparent screen placed over a television screen displaying a maze with player represented by white dots to move along the maze and to not hit the walls which would reset their position at the start of the maze. The goal was for one player, representing the mouse, to get the safe "mouse house" while avoiding the cat controlled by the other player.[13] Allan Alcorn of Atari would develop Gotcha (1973), the first maze arcade game.[13][8] where two players would chase each other through the a maze that was displayed from a top-down perspective.[13] The earliest example of implementing a maze in a 3D environment was made with Maze (1973) on the IMLAC PDS-1 computers at a NASA research center in California.[10] Midway would release their own arcade game The Amazing Maze Game (1976) which had players actively escape a maze instead of just catching an opponent and allowed players to compete against a computer controlled opponent.[14]

Towards the late 1970s maze games began to have broader goals. These include games such as Warren Robinett's Atari 2600 game Slot Racers (1978), Sega's arcade game Head On (1979), Technical Science Group's Heiankyo Alien (1979), and Namco's Pac-Man (1980).[12][15] Head On would introduce the idea of collecting dots to proceed to a new level.[10] Bevan said that Head On was an important title as it would feature gameplay of collecting dots, navigating a maze and featured score boosting items which would all become present in the Pac-Man video game series.[16]

Bill Logudice and Matt Barton, the authors of Vintage Games (2009) said that these earlier games were not played much by contemporary gamers as they were eclipsed by Pac-Man and the games influenced by it "in terms of playability, personality, and popularity."[17][1] In 1983, the editors of Electronic Fun with Computers & Games magazine said that Pac-Man changed the face of maze games altogether by introducing an affable character and a bunch of active predators" and that following its release "mazes were everywhere."[18]

1980s

Pac-Man (1980), was developed in Japan and was described by Steven Malliet and Gust De Meyere in Handbook of Computer Game Studies (2005) as "the perfection" of the maze game genre.[1] In the 1970s and early 1980s, video game clones of popular arcade games were rampant, and this growth of clones was followed on home computers. These clones often copied gameplay and had similar names to their original influences.[19] Pac-Man derivatives of these would include clones of Pac-Man with titles like Munch Man (1982), Snapper (1982) or Hungry Horace (1982).[16][19][20] Video games with similar mechanics were released. These included Wizard of Wor (1981) which shared the similar warping passages from Pac-Man.[16] Other games would feature new elements such as the gated-walls in Lady Bug (1981).[21]

In a 1982 court case, Atari secured a copyright injunction against K.C. Munchkin! (1981) for being too close in "look and feel" to Pac-Man. More successful injunctions followed against Packri-Monster (1981) and Mighty Mouth (1981). Online Systems (later known as Sierra) settled out of court over Jawbreaker (1981).[22] While K.C. Munchkin! and other games were pulled from the market, the courts defended the concept of a maze chase game as fair use.[23]

Other games introduced new elements to the gameplay such as side-scrolling in early 1980s titles like Namco's Rally-X (1980) Konami's Tutankham (1982).[21] A few commercial maze games set in 3D spaces were released in the early 1980s such as 3D Monster Maze (1981), Escape From the Mindmaster (1982), and Tunnel Runner (1983).[24][25]

Post-1980s

Writing for the Institute of Game Culture Conservation in 2019, Tada Namisuke said that as scrolling became commonplace in video games, the combination of scrolling in games where the goal was to collect all the items such as dots on a screen worked better in other styles of gameplay.[26]

Towards the mid-1980s, the Pac-Man franchise moved away from its maze game route with trivia games like Professor Pac-Man (1983) and the platformer Pac-Land (1984). The series would return later to similar maze game-styled gameplay elements with later titles like Pac-Mania (1987), Ms. Pac-Man Maze Madness (2000) and Pac-Man Championship Edition (2007).[27] Among the last Western-made arcade maze games was Trog (1990).[25] Towards the 1990s, mazes became prominent features in other genres such as the first-person Role-playing video games for personal computers such as Dungeon Master (1987) and other emerging genres such as the first-person shooters with such as Wolfenstein 3D (1992).[3][28]

See also

References

Footnotes

Sources