In 1973, at NASA’s Ames Research Center, intern Steve Colley had access to an Imlac PDS-1 — a vector graphics terminal that cost as much as a house and had the computing power of a modern greeting card. He made a game where you wandered through a maze. That was it. No enemies. No objectives. Just walls and the quiet realization you’d taken a wrong turn three corridors ago.
Then Greg Thompson added multiplayer and violence. Howard Palmer contributed the floating eyeball avatars. The game spread to MIT via ARPANET, becoming arguably the first networked multiplayer game. Whether it or Spasim (1974) deserves the “first FPS” title is a debate I’m happy to let others sort out.
After landing on the Moon, I was eager to tackle Maze Wars. The real Maze Wars — with multiplayer, with the eyeballs, with players hunting each other through corridors across a network. It seemed like the logical next step. It was ambitious. It was exciting.
Then a baby happened. Babies, it turns out, have opinions about how you spend your time, and “implementing netcode” rarely makes their list of approved activities. The project stretched from months into… considerably more than months. It sat there, half-finished, while I attended to more important matters involving very small humans and very little sleep.
Eventually, I made a decision. The same decision that developers have made since the dawn of software: I cut scope.
No multiplayer. No eyeballs hunting you through the darkness. No networked combat across the digital void. Just a maze. Just wandering. Just the original 1973 experience that Steve Colley created before Greg Thompson showed up and made everything complicated.
Use arrow keys to move through the maze. That’s it.
The irony is not lost on me. I actually implemented a full network API in banjo, my game library. Sockets, connections, the whole thing. It sits there now, unused, like a treadmill purchased in January and abandoned by February. Perhaps a future game will give it purpose. Perhaps it will simply remain as a monument to ambition.
For now, there is only the maze.
The corridor rendering was an interesting problem to solve, at least. No real 3D math — just precomputed rectangles shrinking toward a vanishing point. The kind of clever hack that makes you appreciate what developers accomplished on hardware that would now struggle to run a screensaver.
Now it’s time to move forward to 1975.