Talk:Maze (1973 video game)

X11 reference

Added X11 reference as I remember playing this a lot when I was a grad student at OttawaU on a network of 386/25MHz machines running SCO UNIX, but with the X11R4 server. Source code from X11R4 is here: http://dandelion-patch.mit.edu/afs/athena/astaff/project/x11r4/src/contrib/games/mazewar/README - and I have fixed it up enough to compile the basic game on Linux (RHEL5) - message me if you want me to mail you the tar file. Vladhed (talk) 15:31, 30 March 2011 (UTC)

content license

Please note: The article text was copied and pasted verbatim from the website of DigiBarn Computer Museum whose content is licensed for used under the creative commons license.

Um.. lack of facts?

Isn't it usual for an encyclopedic article to contain useful information like release date, platform, development time etc? Sadly lacking here. Nigedo (talk) 15:28, 26 May 2009 (UTC)

Peculiar Terminology

What exactly is isomorphic perspective? Isomorphic is a math word, but it doesn't generally refer to perspective. There is a kind of projection called isometric, but it's not what Maze War does. The usual name for the Maze War projection is one point perspective. Tom Duff 00:22, 11 April 2007 (UTC)

error?

I removed "Soon after, the Imlacs were networked to the IBM 1800, and Greg Thompson (later founder of nCube) modified the game to use the network." from the article; so far, I have not found any evidence of Maze connection to an 1800. I will try to remember to ask GT. -- 68.160.131.181 19:34, 27 June 2007 (UTC)

research

while mostly based on digibarn materials, some of this article is based on email I have exchanged with client authors. I will endeavor to have this added to the digibarn site. -- 68.160.131.181 19:34, 27 June 2007 (UTC)

Yet another version

There was yet another version of Maze Wars. This one was created around 1983 by network developers at Apple Computer. This version was called Bus'd Out and was used to debug the original AppleTalk networking stack (later called LocalTalk) on early Macintosh systems. The one oddity is that it only operated on the modem port (rather than the typical printer port for early AppleTalk networking).

Stub

This is a stub. Someone who knows how should mark it as such.

Added. Also removed that off-topic prior art intellectual property thing. If someone could add some citations to this article, that would be great. Achilles2.0 (talk) 10:34, 12 July 2009 (UTC)

What hardware did this program run on?

--Nyelvmark (talk) 19:07, 21 February 2009 (UTC)

The main article needs to specify a date (however approximate) when the game was created.--80.235.139.110 (talk) 20:50, 26 April 2009 (UTC)

earlier Mac version than MacroMind

There was a Macintosh version of Maze Wars that preceeded the MacroMind version. This version was written in-house at Apple, presumably to exercise the AppleTalk stack and flesh out any issues. It had one odd requirement in that it used the opposite serial port as AppleTalk/LocalTalk normally used (modem instead of printer IIRC). I played this on a group of networked Macs as early as 1985. It was probably less featured than the MacroMind version, and may have been the inspiration for the MacroMind version. It was never intended for the public at large, but Apple in those days leaked a bit.

Cosmicray (talk) 04:25, 12 December 2013 (UTC)

Potential source

{{cite journal | author=Handy, Alex | title=The First First-Person Shooter | journal=[[Computer Games Magazine]] | date=July 2005 | issue=176 | pages=45-47 }} [1], [2], [3] --PresN 15:38, 11 November 2017 (UTC)

VT100 version

There was a version that let people on VT100 ASCII terminals play against folks with fancier screens, such as Sunview. I recall playing a version of it on a Vax/VMS system. I can't find the source code for it right now, but here's a Usenet posting from August 27, 1984 announcing its availability https://groups.google.com/d/topic/net.sources/-z5SXYWtkcw/discussion :

From: mazewar@ucbcory (The Mazewar Game)

Mazewar is a multi-player, multi-cpu, real-time game designed to

be played on VAX and SUN computers running 4.2 BSD UNIX.

The SUN implementation of Mazewar uses the SUN graphics to create

three dimensional displays. An ASCII mode is provided for non-SUN

terminals.

Source is available free upon request. All requests should be

made by mailing to "...!ucbvax!ucbcory!mazewar"

This game was written by the following people:

Chris Guthrie ...!ucbvax!ucbcory!chris

Nick Lai ...!ucbvax!ucbcory!lai

John Coker ...!ucbvax!ucbcory!jcoker — Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.18.238.74 (talk) 00:40, 1 April 2019 (UTC)

GA Review

This review is transcluded from Talk:Maze (1973 video game)/GA1. The edit link for this section can be used to add comments to the review.

Reviewer: Indrian (talk · contribs) 00:27, 23 June 2022 (UTC)

Another early game article by PresN often means another GA review by Indrian. I will take care of this within the next couple of days. Indrian (talk) 00:27, 23 June 2022 (UTC)

This article is truly outstanding; I made a few grammatical edits and only have a few really minor points for you to look at. If the review seems a little nitpicky at times, it's only because everything is already so good.

Lead

• "and could be played on two computers networked together with a wire" - This is technically correct, but something about saying it this way just sounds odd to me. It might be my problem. "Networked together with a wire" just has me picturing a piece of string dangling between two machines, even though I know that's not what the article is saying. It might be fine, but if you can think of a less awkward wording, I am all for it.
• "This version of the game was improved by other programmers at MIT and went on to be playable over the nascent ARPANET between players at different universities." - This sentence is also a little awkward. "Went on to be playable" is wordy, and "playable [...] between players is a bit repetitious.
• "It was very popular at the universities" - which universities? I know we don't want to list them in the lead, nor should we, but by using the definite article "the" its implying reference to specific institutions, which have not actually been identified.
• "It was very popular at the universities, with the laboratory managers at MIT both playing the game and trying to restrict it due to the large amount of time students were spending on it, and there are reports that the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) at one point banned the game from the ARPANET due to its popularity." - This sentence is really long. The wording is fine, but maybe break it up.
• "Maze was later developed into several other versions" - Passive voice.
• "This version" - I know this refers to the Xerox version, but since the previous sentence mentions two versions, this is vague.
• "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." - This info is important in the body, but it may be just a bit in the weeds for the lead.
• "first avatars" - Link avatar?

Gameplay

• "along with an indicator of which direction they are looking" - What is the nature of this indicator?
• "the target has a short time to move away before they can be shot again" - Do we know this time increment? No big deal if we do not.

Maze

• "The game was inconsistently named both Maze and Maze War: while Thompson and Colley, writing 30 years later, refer to it as Maze, Palmer refers to it as Maze War. Both names would continue to be used for the next version of the game although the source code titles itself "Maze"." - I already made a couple of light edits to this section for flow, but there is also a chronology problem to address. The sentence about "the next version of the game" comes after a sentence describing how Thompson and Colley referred to it "writing 30 years later." This order implies that the next version in question arrived over 30 years after the original.
• "he made them adjust to move slower when their score reached a limit." - Awkward
• "The game was popular around the lab as well as with MIT students from other labs and outside the building, as any student or professor could set up an account on the system, and they would come by just to play Maze" - A little long and awkwardly worded. Rework.
• "The Maze code was developed by other people as well as Thompson and Lebling" - Passive voice.

The Maze Game and Mazewar

• "rewrote Maze for the Xerox Alto computer, which could communicate with each other directly using the nascent ethernet networking protocol" - Some subject verb agreement issues here since we start be referring to the Xerox Alto computer, singular, but then transition to talking about multiple Alto computers networking together.
• "Wahrman had played the game at MIT in 1976 while they both worked at RAND Corporation" - "They" is lacking an antecedent.

And that's it. I will put the review  On hold while these minor issues are addressed. Indrian (talk) 16:27, 23 June 2022 (UTC)

@Indrian: All done now; I thought I didn't have the grace time before shots work again but it's listed in the source code. Thanks for reviewing the article and dealing with my run-on sentences! --PresN 21:55, 26 June 2022 (UTC)

Thanks. I should be able to wrap this up at the end of the week. Indrian (talk) 15:59, 29 June 2022 (UTC)

Took me a little longer to get back to this than I anticipated, but after making a few more small changes for flow, I am ready to promote. This is another fine early video game article, well done! Indrian (talk) 13:39, 5 July 2022 (UTC)

PDP-10

The article states the PDP-10 was a 'minicomputer'. It certainly was not, it was a (large) mainframe. There are also, as noted by others, a fair lack of info in the main article. I will edit the article to fix the PDP-10 misquote BTW, I wasted many late hours playing Maze in the MIT-AI lab in the roughly 74 time frame. We all thought it was amazing, How times have changed. Wjenh (talk) 11:54, 26 April 2024 (UTC)

You're correct, I must have been thinking of the PDP-11 but the 10 was a full-sized mainframe. If you have reliable sources for any missing information, feel free to add it/them. --PresN 14:24, 26 April 2024 (UTC)