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`DigiBarn Games: Maze War Retrospective
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`Just Held on November 7th, 2004
`Review our Maze War 30 Year Retrospective
`Celebrating the "World's First First Person Shooter"
`Click on the eyeball below for details
`
`Go to Maze Event pages
`
`The Maze War 30 Year Retrospective at the DigiBarn
`Celebrating Thirty Years (1974) of the world's first multiplayer 3D game environment!
`
`Introduction to Maze War
`How we got started: a printed Screen Shot
`Origins and ports of Maze War
`Howard Palmer reports the True Early History of Maze War!
`Maze War on Alto at Xerox PARC (notes from David Maynard)
`Others Comments on Maze War
`Maze War Lives Again!
`Maze War 30th Birthday at the Vintage Computer Festival 7.0
`More Maze War Links
`
`DigiBarn TV Movies! Of Maze in action on various machines!
`Introduction to Maze War
`
`Maze War was the first networked, 3D multiuser first person shooter game. Maze War first
`brought us the concept of online players as eyeball "avatars" chasing each other around in a
`maze). From its 1974 origins on the Imlacs PDS1 at the NASA Ames Research Center in
`California, to its life in project MAC at MIT, on Xerox Altos and "D* Machines" running on early
`ethernet, to versions ported to Mac, NeXT and PalmOS, Maze War started it all. Today's
`massively multiuser 3D games owe a great debt to Maze War and those who created and kept
`on porting it to new systems for the past 30 years. Maze War or "Maze" as it is affectionately
`known, is the reason why nobody can claim ownership of the rights to the invention of a multi
`user 3D cyberspace.
`
`How we got started: a printed Screen Shot
`
`Click here to see the full scan of Dan's Xerox Star 8010 Maze War printout
`See cleaned up version here
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`http://www.digibarn.com/collections/games/xeroxmazewar/
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`DigiBarn Games: Maze War Retrospective
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`Shown here (and housed in our collections) is the only known original printed screen shot of
`Maze War in action on the Xerox Star 8010, provided by Dan Croghan, playing the game in
`1985 or 1986 at Xerox. He is seeing the game from the perspective of his desktop and his
`opponent is the eyeball on the screen and is named "SH". Dan is in turn the player named
`"bloodshot" (you can see his and his opponent's point score at the bottom). The overhead view
`of the maze is seen below, the 3D view above, with the player's "avatar" shown.
`
`Dan tells us that this was a "heart pounding game" when compared to the otherwise dull
`environment of the Xerox document/desktop metaphor. He noted that you could "shoot" your
`opponent if they did not see you (their eyeball character was facing away from you). He also
`notes that you could "hide" in parts of the maze and wait in ambush. Presumably you could
`only see your location in the overhead map, not that of the other players (that would be a cheat
`that would make the game very boring!). You can see an almost identical image of Maze War
`running on a Xerox Alto here.
`
`Origins and ports of Maze War
`
`Played over the ethernet by researchers and regular employees alike, the earlier origins of this
`game at NASA Ames Research Center are reported in the section below by Howard Palmer
`below. David Maynard reports that at Xerox PARC, its earliest date of use was probably 1975
`or 1976 on the Alto. Through research we have determined it was coded for the Xerox
`machines by Jim Guyton, Bruce Malasky, and assorted others at Xerox Palo Alto Research
`Center (PARC). We presume it was then ported to MESA for the Star, 6085/Viewpoint and
`later GlobalView for Sun and the PC. We don't know who did the ports for Mac, NeXT or
`PalmOS.
`
`Maze War represents an early example of the division between the staid and rather uninspiring
`environment of documentGUI computer interfaces for "serious work" and the dynamic, social,
`energetic environments of virtual worlds for play.
`
`We then asked: is Maze War actually the first such environment? Know any more about
`"Maze"? Let us know!
`
`Howard Palmer reports the True Early History of Maze War!
`
`Ask and ye shall receive! Howard Palmer found our initial Maze War page and gave us some
`gems of history:
`
`Cool! But I don't think it was created at Xerox originally. Here's my take on the history:
`
`In the early 1970s, there was a group of guys at NASA Ames working under a program that
`Ames had with local high schools. There was a machine called an Imlac PDS1, which was
`sort of like a PDP8, but with 16 bits and a vector graphics coprocessor (see
`http://www.blinkenlights.com/classiccmp/imlac/ ). Ames had several of these and it fell upon
`this group to make them do something useful. Given our ages at the time, that naturally
`included some games. Initially the games were 2D, similar to pong, many of which were
`written to exactly duplicate an arcade game in a local Togo's, for the purpose of practicing
`without the quarters, in order to get good enough to win a free sandwich. (No one ever won the
`sandwich, though, as far as I remember.)
`
`Howard Palmer writes further:
`
`Rather, it was a game (whose original name I can't recall) which Don O'Brien tried to exactly
`reproduce on the Imlac in a program he called "Drop". I think there were three rows of
`rectangles at the bottom of the screen, moving horizontally in different directions and different
`speeds. You would drop a bomb and try to hit a rectangle as it moved, with the bottom
`rectangles being worth the most points. No one ever won the sandwich because the game in
`Togo's was removed before we got good enough by practicing with Drop on the Imlacs.
`
`The Imlacs PDS1 at NASA's Ames Research Center
`The senior members of this group were Steve Colley (see Steve's history of Maze here) and
`myself. We had written a lot of useful software for the Imlac, but never any games, and we
`were feeling like it was time that we proved that we, too, could write fun code. As we were
`sitting around brainstorming one day, we came up with idea of a networked, multiplayer maze
`game. I suggested to Steve that it would be really cool if it could be 3D, but Steve didn't think
`that the Imlac had the necessary processing power. But then I pointed out that a maze with all
`90 degree angles might enable a simpler 3D rendering than the general case. Steve got
`excited about this, and as he often did, came back the next day with an implementation of the
`graphics for the maze navigation. Within a short time, networking code was added to get the
`http://www.digibarn.com/collections/games/xeroxmazewar/
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`multiplayer version going (we had been experimenting with ad hoc LANS for the Imlacs as part
`of our more serious work).
`
`One of the members of this group, Greg Thompson, took the Ames Maze War to MIT (see
`Greg's description here) when he started there. Greg, Mark Horowitz (now professor Horowitz
`at Stanford), and George Woltman (of Mersenne Prime fame) built a hardware
`implementation of Maze War for a class project there. Beyond this, my knowledge is fuzzy, but
`I believe Maze War propagated from MIT to Xerox. Some where along the line, a version was
`implemented that worked over the ARPAnet, and it took off from there.
`
`Greg Thompson can be reached at gregt@ncube.com (Steve founded nCube, sold it to Larry
`Ellison). He can probably give you more details about what happened with Maze War at MIT, if
`you're interested. He may have listings of the Imlac code.
`
`I look forward to visiting the DigiBarn. My first computer was a DigiComp (see
`http://www.rdrop.com/~jimw/P0076.JPG), BTW.
`
`See more about Howard here.
`
`Maze War on Alto at Xerox PARC (notes from David Maynard)
`
`I was at Xerox P.A.R.C. when Maze Wars was first released on the Alto. I beleive this was in
`1976 or 1977. It was an immediate hit with all the engineers. For a little while, work almost
`stopped. Management was powerless to do anything about it. You could hear the distinctive
`clicking of the keysets* as you walked down the hallways. One very nice feature of Maze Wars
`was the ability to peek around a corner without becoming visible to those in the hallway you
`were peeking down. This greatly added to the tension and strategy. Your description is correct
`in that you could only see your own location on the overhead map. It was all programmers
`playing, and the source code was checked into the central source code repositories, therefore
`it was inevitable that several unscrupulous programmers created cheat versions allowing them
`to become "Maze Lords" and see everyone's position. This so upset the original authors that
`they eventually decided to store the sources in the repository in an encrypted format. The
`Maze War sources were the only ones encrypted, even though these repositories contained
`many of the early crown jewels of computer science.
`
`* The keyset was an input device with five piano key shaped keys that one corded with the left
`hand while the mose was in the right hand, reinvented by Doug Englebart at SRI when he
`invented the mouse. He tried to patent both devices in the late sixties. He got the patent on the
`mouse, along with Bill English, but discovered that the keyset was patented in the 1860's by
`Western Union.
`
`Others Comments on Maze War
`
`Stan Sieler (sieler@allegro.com) writes:
`
`I noticed the 1971 date for "Maze War" ... yet, the article doesn't seem to bear out that date.
`At best, towards the end, we get a mid1970s date. The reason I'm curious about this is that I
`finally tracked down the programmer of SOLAR, a 3D multiuser space warfare game that ran
`on a Burroughs B6700... around 1972/1973. He's not familiar with other computing gaming
`history, and is making no claims, but I was curious :)
`
`Ted Kaehler contributed this cartoon:
`
`Click here for a large image
`
`Ted writes:
`Here is a cartoon I drew when MazeWar was new at PARC. I think the cartoon was from 1980.
`Harold Hall was the new head of the Systems Science Lab, SSL. He often came looking for
`people that he did not know. LRG is the Learning Research Group, and I and Bob Flegal were
`in it. I think he actually did pop in and say he was looking for Bob Flegal when one of us was
`playing MazeWar. I immediately drew this cartoon and posted it on the wall.
`
`Maze War Lives Again!
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`http://www.digibarn.com/collections/games/xeroxmazewar/
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`For the grand opening of the DigiBarn on July 13, 2002, Don Woodward, a former Xerox guy
`and current collector/maintainer of Xerox hardware, got Maze War running on our Xerox 6085
`network. Al Kossow let us know he actually has MESA source code for the Xerox Maze War.
`Don had the executables and set up GlobalView for X (Sun Solaris), GlobalView for Windows,
`and we then offered Maze War play to attendees on the 6085 and Windows machines. It was
`a thrill.
`
`NEW! See Maze War working at the DigiBarn on Xerox 6085! (Thanks Don Woodward)
`
`Someone reported to us that they believe that Maze War was ported to the NeXT workstation
`so it could well be that it continues to live on.
`
`Maze War 30th Birthday at Vintage Computer Festival 7.0
`
`We just celebrated the 30th anniversary (19742004) of Maze! See our review of the Maze
`War Retrospective event which was held at the VCF 7.0 on November 7th, 2004. There is a
`great deal more information on Maze on those pages. This event resembled our Alto 30th
`birthday party at the VCF in 2003.
`More Maze War Links
`
`Documentation of Maze from Imlacs on up provided by Greg Thompson
`
`Al Kossow set up and run Maze War on Altos back in 1987, see the mention of it at his
`Xerox Workstations Collections page
`
`MazeWars on the Palm Pilot:
`http://www.palmgamingworld.com/action/mazewars.shtml
`
`Further information on David Lebling who did the PDP10 side at MIT Project Mac can be
`found at:
`http://www.infocomif.org/authors/lebling.html
`
`Pictures of the Imlacs at MIT Project MAC, later called Laboratory for Computer Sciences
`(LCS) can be found at:
`http://www.medg.lcs.mit.edu/people/psz/LCS75/programming.html
`
`Planet of the Feebs, a game loosely modeled on Maze War with more information here
`
`See our Maze War brochure by Oracle for Maze being played at an InterOp conference.
`
`Know any more about "Maze"? Contact us!
`
`Please send site comments to our Webmaster.
`Please see our notices about the content of this site and its usage.
`(cc) 19982015 Digibarn Computer Museum, some rights reserved under this Creative Commons license.
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`http://www.digibarn.com/collections/games/xeroxmazewar/
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