Computing History of Mazes
From Maze
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While visual mazes might seem to be more "maze-like," in fact, the early procedural mazes were most often textual. Most significantly, mazes were a central feature of early text-based adventure games, now known as interactive fiction. Mazes in these games were not symmetrical spaces to navigate so much as puzzles to solve, non-Euclidean space represented textually. The genre began with the groundbreaking Will Crowther's ''Adventure'', written for the PDP-10 mainframe in 1977 and expanded by Don Woods into a full-fledged underground adventure. Basing the game in part on his own caving experience in the Mammoth Cave system, Crowther included in Adventure a ten-room "MAZE OF TWISTY LITTLE PASSAGES, ALL ALIKE." Woods would go on to add a second maze, this time "TWISTY LITTLE PASSAGES, ALL DIFFERENT" (Jerz 2007, 23). | While visual mazes might seem to be more "maze-like," in fact, the early procedural mazes were most often textual. Most significantly, mazes were a central feature of early text-based adventure games, now known as interactive fiction. Mazes in these games were not symmetrical spaces to navigate so much as puzzles to solve, non-Euclidean space represented textually. The genre began with the groundbreaking Will Crowther's ''Adventure'', written for the PDP-10 mainframe in 1977 and expanded by Don Woods into a full-fledged underground adventure. Basing the game in part on his own caving experience in the Mammoth Cave system, Crowther included in Adventure a ten-room "MAZE OF TWISTY LITTLE PASSAGES, ALL ALIKE." Woods would go on to add a second maze, this time "TWISTY LITTLE PASSAGES, ALL DIFFERENT" (Jerz 2007, 23). | ||
| − | One important consequence of textual procedural mazes is that the players solving them often generated secondary, visual mazes, often sharing them via BBSes or home computer user groups. Maze begets maze. For example, Jason Scott's TEXTFILES archive of text files found on BBS, FTP, and Gopher servers in the eighties, holds several early ASCII maps created by players of ''Adventure'', such as this map of the twisty little passages all alike: | + | One important consequence of textual procedural mazes is that the players solving them often generated secondary, visual mazes, often sharing them via BBSes or home computer user groups. Maze begets maze. For example, Jason Scott's TEXTFILES archive of text files found on BBS, FTP, and Gopher servers in the eighties, holds several early ASCII maps created by players of ''Adventure'', such as this [http://www.textfiles.com/adventure/mazmap.adv map of the twisty little passages all alike]: |
Note: This maze is the same for both Adventure 350 and 550 | Note: This maze is the same for both Adventure 350 and 550 | ||
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_____| |___ | BACK | | _____| |___ | BACK | | ||
W_______________________E |PIRATEDEN| | W_______________________E |PIRATEDEN| | ||
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| + | Downloaded From P-80 Systems 304-744-2253 | ||
Adventure was enormously influential upon a generation of programmers and videogame players, but most immediately, the text adventure game inspired the even better known ''Zork.'' ''Zork'' too included a troublesome maze, its complexities most evident when fully mapped, as in this detailed map apparently drawn by a gamer named Steven Jones, which was originally published in DEC Professional in November 1982: | Adventure was enormously influential upon a generation of programmers and videogame players, but most immediately, the text adventure game inspired the even better known ''Zork.'' ''Zork'' too included a troublesome maze, its complexities most evident when fully mapped, as in this detailed map apparently drawn by a gamer named Steven Jones, which was originally published in DEC Professional in November 1982: | ||
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===Visual Procedural Mazes=== | ===Visual Procedural Mazes=== | ||
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==Screen Mazes== | ==Screen Mazes== | ||
