Maze Wars

Where it comes from

Maze War was written in 1973 at NASA's Ames Research Center and is generally counted as the first first-person shooter. It put you inside a wireframe maze, moving a square at a time and turning in right angles, and it drew the other players as floating eyeballs. Those eyeballs are usually called the first avatars in a networked game.

Callisto brought it to the Macintosh in 1993 as Super Maze Wars, with gems to pick up and half a dozen opponents to worry about. This is my own game in that lineage rather than a copy of either: the hall, the pillars and the eyes are drawn here from scratch.

The floor is an open grid with a pillar on every other square rather than a twisting maze, which is the shape the original ran on. Corridors still come out one square wide, but the sight lines run the length of the arena, and that is what makes a pillar worth standing behind.

Twenty-one squares across, and the odd number is not a preference. The pillars sit on the even squares inside a solid ring, so an even width puts a pillar hard against the outer wall and seals the corridor that runs round the edge. A test walks that ring on every size the arena is ever built at.

The eyeball survives here as the eye on a ship's prow, which is the one thing about it that has to be readable. A robot fires along the way it faces and no other way, so the shape has to say which way that is before it matters rather than after. Nose towards you and the eye is dead on. Nose away and there is no eye at all, only the glow off its engines. The eye lights up red on the turn it actually has you, which is the turn you have to break the line.

They have a colour each, and the hull, the arrowhead on the map and the name in the console all use it. The 1993 console did this, and it is the thing that makes a console worth having: three identical arrowheads tell you that something is out there, and three coloured ones tell you which one has been following you. The colours are fixed rather than themed, like the floor and the sky, because identity should not change with the time of day.

The radar shows them too, each one pointing the way it is pointing, and rings the one that has you. It used to leave them off on the grounds that a map should tell you where you have been rather than where they are. That was the wrong call once facing became the fact the game turns on: knowing a ship is two rows over is worth little, and knowing it is two rows over and looking down your row is worth the turn it takes to move. It does make the game easier. That is the trade.

Four sounds, synthesised rather than shipped as files, so every interval in them is chosen on purpose and checked by a test. The trigger is a falling fifth and the quietest thing here, since you pull it more than you do anything else. A hit is a major triad rolled upward, delayed by exactly the flight of the bolt so that it lands when the bolt lands. A gem is a rising fourth, the brightest sound in the game. Being shot is a tritone low down, and no louder than hitting something, because the worst turn of the game should not be the one that makes you jump. An empty magazine gets a click, which is not a shot and should not sound like one.

A turn at a time

Nothing here changes while you are thinking. The robots take their step when you take yours, which is closer to the original than it sounds, since it also moved a whole square at a time. It means standing at a corner and looking costs you nothing but the turn, and the game is about what you can see rather than how fast you can react.

On a phone, swipe the window: up to step forward, down to step back, left and right to turn. The buttons are laid out for a thumb as well, a pad of four for getting about and Fire on its own, big enough not to miss and far enough away not to hit by accident.

Things do move, though, which is a different claim. A step slides and a turn sweeps rather than cutting, and the gems turn on a real clock. None of that can get the game wrong, because none of it is deciding anything: the step had already landed and the turn had already finished before the first frame was asked for, and a gem that is turning is not a gem that is doing anything. Its height, which does decide whether you can take it, is still counted in turns.

It also makes the whole game a function of the board and one action, with no clock anywhere in it. That is the same property that made the Crokinole opponent cheap to write, and it means every rule on this page is checked by a test rather than by me playing it and hoping.

A shot runs straight down the row you are facing and stops at the first wall, for you and for them equally. You can see across the hall in every direction a pillar allows, but you can only shoot along the row, so an eye off to one side is a thing to turn towards rather than a thing to fire at.

Twenty rounds in the gauge on the left, and three green crates of ammunition out in the hall at any time. Walk into one and it is worth eight; another appears somewhere else the moment you take it. They hang a third of the way off the floor as hollow frames you can see straight through, turning slowly even while you stand still, so they read as something to collect rather than something left lying about. They do not bob the way the gem does, because timing is the point of the gem, and a crate that had to be timed as well would be the same puzzle twice. On the radar they are green squares. What you fire is a small red tetrahedron, the gem's shape, spinning away down the row.

The gauge on the right is the shield, and being shot spends two of its eight. Three red crates, hollow cubes you can see through turning slowly in the air, fill it all the way in one go; on the radar they are red squares. Neither gauge comes back on its own during a life, for you or for the ships. Rounds come from the green crates and shield from the red ones, and running dry is on you: watch both gauges and go for a pickup before you need it. Being destroyed is the one exception, and you come back with a full shield and a full magazine.

When the shield breaks you are destroyed. The window cracks and goes white for a moment, and behind it you are already somewhere else in the hall, thrown there with a full shield, while the radar draws the line back to where you were. Under a second, because it is a jolt and not a loading screen. A ship you destroy comes apart where it stood, in its own colour, and is gone; it turns up somewhere else once the pieces have settled rather than sliding there through the pillars, which is what it used to do.

The ships come looking. One that has seen you remembers the square you were standing on and walks there, and forgets after about half a dozen turns or as soon as it arrives and finds nothing. It goes where you were rather than where you are, so breaking the line and moving still works; it just costs more than standing still used to.

Breaking the line has to mean leaving it, though. A ship that has you lined up and loses you for a turn picks up its aim where it left off if you step straight back in, so the warning buys you one move out and not a way to hop in and out of its corridor for free. It used to start counting again every time its target changed, and two ships each lined up on the other with something stepping between them would stand there for the rest of the game without either one firing.

There are three of them and they have names. A different trio each game, which is worth more than it sounds: a hall with Huey, Dewey and Louie in it is not the same hall as one with the Fates. Three rather than five because you can keep track of three things you can name and you cannot keep track of five strangers, and a fourth would have been back to being a robot.

They are not on a side. Each one looks for the nearest thing down its corridor and shoots whatever that turns out to be, which most of the time is one of the others. Across a thousand turns they landed three hundred and fifty hits and only a third of them were on me. That single change is most of the difference between three hazards pointed at one person and a hall with something going on in it, and it means a corridor with two of them already in it is somewhere you might rather let them have.

The thing in the middle of the console is a radar and not a map, which is a handful of decisions and the 1993 console made all of them. It does not draw the pillars: they sit on every even square without exception, so eighty-one identical blocks told you something you already knew and crowded out the handful of things you did not. It is turned to face the way you are facing, so left on the dial is left through the window and there is no rotation to do in your head. It reaches ten squares and no further, because a map of the whole arena is knowing where everybody is at all times.

And it is a wedge rather than a disc: a hundred and twenty degrees in front of you, with you at the point of it, and nothing at all behind. A dial that saw in every direction was telling you things your eyes could not, and it meant turning round was something you never had to do. Sweeping it now costs turns, which is the currency everything else in this game is priced in. Everything beyond the outer wall is filled in grey, because a line on its own left the far side of it looking like more floor, and near a wall you could not tell which side of the line you were on.

What that last one takes away is the ability to walk straight to the gem, which is why the gem is drawn as a box rather than a dot. The box holds the gem somewhere inside it and not at its middle, so it is a place to search rather than a place to walk to, and it widens with every gem you find. The arena never changes; the searching is what gets harder.

Which is what the console under the window is for. Everyone keeps their own score, their own kills and their own deaths, so you can see who is winning, and it is quite often not you. Kills and not hits: it takes four hits to break a shield, so a count of hits was mostly a count of the three that changed nothing. A row lights up in its own colour the moment that one is destroyed, and being destroyed throws them clear the same way it throws you, rather than deleting them and quietly spawning a replacement, because a thing with a name and a column cannot be swapped for a fresh one halfway through.

The sounds are placed in the room. A shot that hits you is panned to the side it came from and quietened by how far off it was, which is the part the log line was standing in for. Two ears cannot tell ahead from behind, so the log still names the direction; what the panning adds is the half you notice without reading. A kill is the hit taken up to the octave, and plays instead of it rather than on top. Being destroyed is the sound of being hit an octave down, heavier and slower but no louder, because the worst turn of the game should not be the one that makes you jump. Two ships destroying each other is a falling minor third, placed wherever in the hall it happened.

Everything else you do makes a sound too, and the ones you make every turn are the quietest in the game: a soft tap for a step and a lower one for a step back, a pair of notes panned to the side you turn towards, and a dull bump for a wall. A pickup of rounds clicks up a major third and a shield crate rolls up a longer arpeggio, and either one flattens to a single note if you had no room for it. Waiting under a gem pings softly each turn. A ship lining you up beeps twice from where it is, which is the sound that should make you move, and a ship taking a gem plays yours turned upside down from where it took it. A shot that finds nothing ticks off the far wall when the bolt gets there. Five gems first is a rising arpeggio, and a ship getting there is four notes sinking.

One gem at a time, and the first to five takes the game. A floor strewn with them made the hall a shopping list, and with the bob deciding whether each one is yours this moment, a dozen bobbing at once is a dozen things to keep half an eye on. Take it and the next appears somewhere else, so there is always exactly one and always somewhere to be going.

When someone gets there the window says who, in their own colour, and how many turns it took, and the table under the console gives everyone's finish: gems first, because gems decide it, then kills and deaths. Again is in the window and under it, and Enter does the same from the keyboard.

The ships are in the race, and on your terms. They have the same radar you have, the same hint box, and the same wait under a gem that is up. A ship that catches the box on its dial goes and searches it; one that sees the gem down its row walks to it and stands underneath until it comes down. What it never gets is the square the gem is on before it has seen it, which is exactly what you never get either.

The one place they are held back is attention. A ship only looks at its dial one turn in eight, because there are three of them and one of you, and with their eyes on it every turn they won the race three times in five. That number and every other one here come from a scripted player that plays the way this page tells you to: it sweeps the radar, searches the box, shoots what is in front of it and steps out of a corridor when it is warned, and it is allowed to know only what is on the screen, which a test checks. Against ships that did not look for the gem it won five hundred games of five hundred. Against these it wins a little over half, 559 of a thousand games, now that it stops for shield crates when its shield is low and nothing refills on its own. You are probably better at this than it is, so expect to win more than that, and expect the console to be worth watching.

They rise and fall on a six-turn cycle and you can walk straight under one that is up. Stand on its square and wait and it drops into your hands, which on an open floor with three ships on it is not a free thing to do. Two of the six turns are out of reach either side of the top, so the longest you can ever be made to wait is four.

The cycle is counted in turns rather than in seconds, like everything else here: if it ran on a clock, the gem you could see and the gem the rules were using would drift apart, and you would reach for one that looked close and come away with nothing.

There is an instrument at the foot of the window for the one you are standing on, because a gem in your own square is at zero distance from the eye and falls out of the projection entirely. The one moment the bob decides anything was the one moment you could not watch it. It shows the gem against the line it has to come under, which is the thing you are actually waiting for.