Computing History of Mazes
From Maze
The Appearance of 10 Print
This chapter argues that the use of the word "maze" to describe what by many definitions is not a maze is rooted in the cultural history of the word in the 1970s and early 1980s, when "maze" conjured up specific images that resonated with home computer users.
From its very beginnings, the pattern generated by 10 Print was called a maze. Consider the earliest known iteration of the program, found in the Commodore 64 User’s Guide that was included with every C64 computer (1982). The Advanced Basic chapter offers "an introduction to designing graphics" and provides a "neat little program" that uses the RND function--the random number generator--to draw on the screen:
10 PRINT "{CLR/HOME}"
20 PRINT CHR$(205.5 + RND(1));
40 GOTO 20
The program is three lines long; little indeed, but not as small as the program that would later inspire this book. In the course of parsing the three lines, the manual explains that the graphic characters on the right side of the M and N keys "are the two characters that the program is using for the maze" (53). And there it is, the first instance of this pattern generated by the random alternation of two slashes being called a "maze."
Two years later the pattern was once again described as a maze in the Commodore 64 hobbyist magazine Run. A section of Run called "Magic" featured C64 tricks mailed in by users, and in the July 1984 issue, the editor Louis F. Sander announced an
Amazing one liner--Here is one of the best one-liners I’ve ever seen. It works on the VIC and C-64, drawing a continuous maze that is very interesting. (13)
The one-liner was submitted by Dan A. Krueger from Cary, Illinois, and it looked like this:
8 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(8));:GOTO 8
The program is slightly different in form than the three-liner found in the Commodore 64 User’s Guide--a fact that is addressed elsewhere in this book--but the pattern itself should be familiar by now.
Twice, then, in the span of two years this design was described in print as a maze. Why? Why describe the output as a maze and not the more general terms design or pattern? The reason likely depends upon the position that mazes held in computer culture in the 1970s and 1980s. Quite simply, this was the era of the maze craze.
One is tempted to pin the advent of maze craze to the release of Pac-Man in the U.S. in October 1980, followed by Ms. Pac-Man in 1981, and the popular (though problematic) subsequent ports of those games to the Atari VCS in early 1982 (Pac-Man) and late 1982 (Ms. Pac-Man). Pac-Man appeared on the Commodore 64 itself in 1983. Early descriptions of Pac-Man often described the playing field of the game as a "maze." For example, in 1981, the New York Times characterized Pac-Man as "a circle with a big mouth that eats up dots in a maze while other big mouths try to eat it up" (Latham 1981), while Newsweek mentioned the "maddening Pac-Man maze" the same year (Langway 1981).
But even before they hit the mainstream in Pac-Man, mazes were a staple of computer culture in its more marginalized forms. 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).
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:
Steven_Roy_Zork_Map_for_DEC_Professional.jpg
2535 × 1616 pixels
In addition to Pac-Man, Adventure, and Zork, other mazes abound [1] in the early days of video arcades and home computers, but these are the most prominent examples. It would simply be impossible to use the word "maze" within the semiotic domain of computers and not create some association with these games. Therefore, there's some cultural capital at work whenever 10 Print's design was called a maze in the early eighties. It is reasonable to conclude that the various sources from the early eighties that called the 10 Print design a "maze" were explicitly (though perhaps not consciously) tapping into a cultural history of mazes that home programmers and game players would be aware of.
Finally, though there’s no evidence to prove this, one wonders whether the program would have the program have had the same viral-like persistence if its description had made no mention of mazes?
Bibliography
Commodore 64 User's Guide. Wayne PA; Indianapolis, IN: Commodore Business Machines; Distributed by Howard W. Sams & Co., 1982. <http://www.commodore.ca/manuals/c64_users_guide/c64-users_guide.htm>.
Jerz, Dennis. "Somewhere Nearby is Colossal Cave: Examining Will Crowther's Original 'Adventure' in Code and in Kentucky." DHQ: Digital Humanities Quarterly 1.2 (2007). <http://digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/001/2/000009/000009.html>.
Krueger, Dan A., and Louis F. Sander. "Magic $93." Run Jul 1984. 13-14. <http://www.old-computer-mags.com/magazine/magazine_viewer_eng.php?idx=Run.htm&base=Run&num=007&page=13>.
Langway, Lynn. "Invasion of the Video Creatures." Newsweek 16 Nov 1981: 90+.
Latham, Aaron. "Video Games Star War." The New York Times 25 Oct 1981: 100+.
