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. | ||
| + | The third-person mazes mentioned so far, like the early first-person mazes, kept to the grid of the display despite the different perspective that was presented. Diagonal orientation of the sort produced by 10 PRINT did have a place in the design of early maze-like games. 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. Two isometric games came to arcdaes in 1982:''Q*bert,'' an completion/avoidance platform on an isometric pyramid, and ''Zaxxon,'' an obstacle-racer emphasizing pseudo-3D elements. Neither was particularly maze-like. Later isometric games did incorporate maze-like obstacles. Both''Ant Attack'' (1983) and ''Marble Madness'' (1984) had convoluted obstacle course on a field that was larger than the screen, accessed through scrolling. | ||
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| + | While 10 PRINT seems to be a non-interactive 2D third-person maze, its single line of code produces an unusual twist on this form of maze, shifting it to a different axis than is traditionally used. This is accomplished by the simple selection of two diagonal character graphics. It introduces another complexity: even though the maze is built from left to right and down the screen, the walls and paths do not have to follow this axis of construction. | ||
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=== Works Cited === | === Works Cited === | ||
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Williams | Williams | ||
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| − | Zork 1 - Maze Map. TEXTFILES. <http://www.textfiles.com/adventure/maze.zk1>. | ||
