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Email thread about Atari ST MIDIMAZE

The maze game on the Atari ST was called MIDIMAZE (Hybrid Arts 1987). It was a staple at the Computer Game Developer's Conference up until it got corporate. Lukas Arts folks used to have a couple of suites set up to play MIDIMAZE and MULE 24/7.
MIDIMAZE made a comeback in 1990 when it was published by Bullet-Proof Software as Faceball 2000 for the Game Boy. It was the first, multiplayer 1st person shooter on a handheld game machine.
David Nolte <david@bluelavawireless.com>
Honolulu, HI USA - Monday, August 26, 2002 at 15:29:41 (CDT)

 
Back around '86 or so I recall many of the other Atari ST folks
getting together for what we would think of as a "LAN-Party" to
play a Mazewar inspired game on the ST.  It communicated over
the ST's MIDI port to form a network.

I also wasted many an afternoon after school playing 'combat'
a 2-d none graphical multi-user space combat simulator on
the MECC (Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium) timeshare system. It used fairly realistic physics for manuvering your ship, all of your control was based on rotation and engine burn length time. Playing on a model-33 teletype at 110 baud, was a chore but we had fun anyway. You got a real sense of accomplishment when you blew up somebody who was running a 300, and if you killed someone who was running at 1200 either you were a god or they really sucked.
Charles Anderson <caa@columbus.rr.com>
Columbus, OH USA - Monday, August 26, 2002 at 11:26:10 (CDT) 

 
Hi, I'm an old friend of Dr. Cat and, as mentioned in your timeline, author of GEnie's A-Maze-ing and the Virtual World Entertainment games. One thing not on your list you might want to add is the game "mazewars" which was what A-Maze-ing was loosely based on. Mazewars appeared sometime prior to 1975 on the ARPA network and was basically a game where giant eyeballs wandered a 3d hidden-line wireframe maze, hunting eachother. So far as I know, there were clients for several types of graphical displays, I was exposed to it on an Imlac vector display with 16 bit CPU, but there were others available.

Write me if you want to chat...Milo
Greg (Milo Mindbender) Corson <greg_corson@acm.org>
San Mateo , ca USA - Monday, August 26, 2002 at 00:34:49 (CDT)

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Raph,

Just read your timeline (linked off of LumTheMad). Very nice, but a few comments are in order.

1) The original Zork, started in 1977, was written by me, Marc Blank (note spelling), Tim Anderson, and Bruce Daniels. Infocom wasn't founded until 1979.

2) One source for Zork is that I was in the game D&D group, which was mostly BBN people, that Wil Crowther was in. Not at the same time, though; I think I actually replaced him when we dropped out.

3) I notice a 3d FPS in 1989 mentioned. Don't forget MazeWars, a Mac-only product from MacroMind (now MacroMedia). It was based on the Xerox Alto MazeWars, which was based on my and Greg Thompson's Maze for the Imlac PDS-1 with PDP-10 as server. We wrote this in (umm) 1974. It was based on a single-player Maze-exploring game Greg brought with him to MIT from NASA. Maze was 3D first-person perspective with up to eight players, any of whom could be robotic. The graphics were a _bit_ less compelling than Quake. You could also chat with the other players.

Best,
Dave Lebling
Dave Lebling <dlebling@shore.net>
USA - Thursday, April 12, 2001 at 08:22:29 (CDT)


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