Maze War

Maze War
Maze War played on an Imlac PDS-1 at the Computer History Museum event.
Developer(s)	Steve Colley, Greg Thompson, others
Platform(s)	Imlac PDS-1, Macintosh, NeXT Computer, Palm OS, Xerox Star, X Window System
Release date(s)	US: 1974
Genre(s)	First-person shooter
Mode(s)	Single player, multiplayer

Maze War (also known as The Maze Game, Maze Wars, Mazewar or simply Maze) is 1974 computer game which originated or disseminated a number of concepts used in thousands of games to follow, and is considered one of the earliest examples of, or progenitor of, a first-person shooter. Uncertainty exists over its exact release date, with some accounts placing it before Spasim, the earliest first-person shooter with a known time of publication.

Although the first-person shooter genre did not crystallize for many years, Maze War had a profound impact on first-person games in other genres, particularly RPGs. The Maze War style view was first adopted by Moria in 1975, an early RPG on the PLATO network, and further popularized by Ultima and Wizardry, eventually appearing in bitmapped form in games like Dungeon Master, Phantasy Star, Eye of the Beholder and countless others.

Gameplay is simple by later standards. Players wander around a maze, being capable of moving backward or forwards, turning right or left in 90-degree increments, and peeking around corners through doorways. The game also uses simple tile-based movement, where the player moves from square to square. Other players are seen as their names, figures or later eyeballs in the Xerox version. When a player sees another player, they can shoot or otherwise negatively affect them. Players gain points for shooting other players, and lose them for being shot. Some versions (like the X11 port) had a cheat mode where the player running the server could see the other players' positions on the map. The original MIT Imlac version had cheat keys to knock out a wall in the player's local Imlac maze copy, which made it possible to walk though walls as seen by other players. Occasionally in later versions, a duck also appears in the passage.