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

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.

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.

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: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: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

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.

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: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: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

[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)