Mazes
From Maze
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Another feature shared by all these games (both arcade and for home video game consoles) is their treatment of the screen display as a single complete visual unit, like the board of a board game. The continuously scrolling maze of 10 PRINT at least suggests a maze that is larger than the screen, even if one cannot navigate around to see what is off-screen. An interesting contrast to the single-screen maze is a close-up design that puts the player in a larger-scale maze, seen in the Atari VCS game ''Adventure'' (1979). Adventure was loosely based on the interactive fiction work of the same name, and featured a hero with a sword collecting treasures despite the efforts of four dragons. Unlike ''Pac-Man'', in which the player can guide Pac-Man out a warp gate on one side of the screen and see him enter on the other side, ''Adventure'' contains numerous topologically impossible warps that are always hidden from view, and can only be deduced. Instead of an overview map of the total maze, each screen is a claustrophobic close-up of simple paths, often emphasizing discontinuous fragments of other paths that can't easily be reached. This kind of claustrophobic, discontinuous maze-space was later further explored on the Atari VCS in ''Haunted House'' (1981), particularly in the use of darkness and the addition of keys in some modes to restrict and sequence room access. | Another feature shared by all these games (both arcade and for home video game consoles) is their treatment of the screen display as a single complete visual unit, like the board of a board game. The continuously scrolling maze of 10 PRINT at least suggests a maze that is larger than the screen, even if one cannot navigate around to see what is off-screen. An interesting contrast to the single-screen maze is a close-up design that puts the player in a larger-scale maze, seen in the Atari VCS game ''Adventure'' (1979). Adventure was loosely based on the interactive fiction work of the same name, and featured a hero with a sword collecting treasures despite the efforts of four dragons. Unlike ''Pac-Man'', in which the player can guide Pac-Man out a warp gate on one side of the screen and see him enter on the other side, ''Adventure'' contains numerous topologically impossible warps that are always hidden from view, and can only be deduced. Instead of an overview map of the total maze, each screen is a claustrophobic close-up of simple paths, often emphasizing discontinuous fragments of other paths that can't easily be reached. This kind of claustrophobic, discontinuous maze-space was later further explored on the Atari VCS in ''Haunted House'' (1981), particularly in the use of darkness and the addition of keys in some modes to restrict and sequence room access. | ||
| − | ==== Isometric Games ==== | ||
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| − | Ant Attack (1983 ZX Spectrum) | ||
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| − | Whether close up or distant, continuous mazes or partitioned obstacle courses, what all these period maze-games have in common is that, unlike the diagonal orientation of 10 Print, all are constructed of horizontal/vertical walls that are orthogonal to the edges of the screen and the scan line of the display. | ||
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| − | Diagonal orientation did have a place in the design of early maze-like games, but not in simple 2D fields -- instead, it emerged through isometric video games that introduced diagonal motion at the same time it challenged the picture plane through the pseudo-3D effect of isometric perspective. In the arcade, two isometric games emerged in 1982: Q*bert, an completion/avoidance platform on an isometric pyramid, and Zaxxon, an obstacle-racer emphasizing pseudo-3D elements. Neither of these game designs is particularly maze-like. | ||
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| − | Later games did incorporate maze-like obstacle elements into isometric gameplay. Part of this limitation was due to available resolution at the time, particularly on home systems. Graphics with isometric effects took up a lot of space, which limited the ability to design large complex level structures like mazes on a unified field. Thus, when ''Ant Attack'' (1983) and ''Marble Madness'' (1984) introduced isometric obstacle course elements on a large field, both did so using scrolling.** By contrast, ''Knight Lore'' (1984) follows the design pattern of Adventure for the VCS, showing a close-up view of one room at a time in a maze-like castle. | ||
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| − | ** ''Ant Attack'' also alters the camera view when navigating behind objects. | ||
| − | Even here, however, we see how extremely different aesthetic of early isometric maze games was when compared to the 10 Print output. While both have a dynamic diagonal orientation, the move from 2D design to volumetric pseudo-3D space leaves them, visually, worlds apart. | ||
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=== Works Cited === | === Works Cited === | ||
