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First Person Shooters (Games) Entertainment Games

Precursor to Doom Racks Up 30 years of Fragging 134

Posted by michael from the eye-of-the-beholder dept.
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."
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Precursor to Doom Racks Up 30 years of Fragging More

Precursor to Doom Racks Up 30 years of Fragging

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  • Anyone remember Dungeons of Daggorath? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by synaptik ( 125 ) on Friday October 29, 2004 @11:06PM (#10670037) Homepage
    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!

  • Wait... there are other games? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 29, 2004 @11:06PM (#10670038)
    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? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Jason1729 ( 561790 ) on Saturday October 30, 2004 @12:55AM (#10670563)
      You haven't been missing much. The eye candy's been increasing as the playability dropped.

      Download the wired CD: wiredcd.itallconnects.com [itallconnects.com]

  • Yeah but what FPS does it get on a GeForce 6800? (Score:5, Funny)

    by gatesh8r ( 182908 ) on Friday October 29, 2004 @11:07PM (#10670044)
    I'm not going to consider it if it's not any faster than Doom III.

  • Duke University (Score:5, Interesting)

    by JabberWokky ( 19442 ) <slashdot.com@timewarp.org> on Friday October 29, 2004 @11:08PM (#10670046) Homepage Journal
    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 (Score:3, Interesting)

      by pHatidic ( 163975 )
      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 (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Monkelectric ( 546685 ) <slashdot AT monkelectric DOT com> on Friday October 29, 2004 @11:52PM (#10670290)
        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.

        • 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 ki

          • 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...
        • 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:Duke University (Score:3, Insightful)

        by JabberWokky ( 19442 )
        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

  • Just imagine... (Score:4, Funny)

    by rune2 ( 547599 ) on Friday October 29, 2004 @11:09PM (#10670052) Homepage
    how many fps that puppy gets now?

  • Ultima Underworld (Score:4, Interesting)

    by 3770 ( 560838 ) on Friday October 29, 2004 @11:12PM (#10670064) Homepage
    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 (Score:5, Informative)

      by 3770 ( 560838 ) on Friday October 29, 2004 @11:21PM (#10670119) Homepage
      Sweeeet!

      I did a search on Ultima Underworld on a whim. And I found this page [uo.com] with some information on the game and a map of the "Stygian Abyss" and even better I found this link [uo.com] 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 (Score:5, Informative)

        by 3770 ( 560838 ) on Friday October 29, 2004 @11:32PM (#10670178) Homepage

        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.
        • 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.
      • It fits on a floppy disk.

        Can you imagine?

    • 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.
    • > 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

  • Richard Garriott (Score:5, Interesting)

    by pHatidic ( 163975 ) on Friday October 29, 2004 @11:13PM (#10670071)
    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.

    • ::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 [freeserve.co.uk] these days..

  • sniping (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Hollins ( 83264 ) on Friday October 29, 2004 @11:15PM (#10670081) Homepage

    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.

  • Play Maze War online? How about on your Palm? (Score:5, Informative)

    by DoorFrame ( 22108 ) on Friday October 29, 2004 @11:15PM (#10670083) Homepage
    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 [shockwave.com] online with shockwave, why not Maze War?

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

  • FPS, circa 1987: MIDI Maze (Score:5, Interesting)

    by dstone ( 191334 ) on Friday October 29, 2004 @11:39PM (#10670222) Homepage
    FPS on Atari STs [wikipedia.org], 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.
    • 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.
      • > 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)
      • Mind you, you couldn't only play games over MIDI
        Yes! Believe it or not, you could also PLAY MUSIC!
    • Plus Midi Maze II had the coolest title theme ever. I've got the first 30 seconds or so somewhere, converted to MP3. :P

  • C'mon... (Score:4, Funny)

    by Lee Tacker ( 768368 ) on Friday October 29, 2004 @11:45PM (#10670245) Homepage
    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!

  • PLATO: Moria, circa 1975 (Score:5, Interesting)

    by RealProgrammer ( 723725 ) on Saturday October 30, 2004 @12:12AM (#10670386) Homepage Journal

    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 [uiuc.edu]. 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.

    • 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 to

      • 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 :-).

      • 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 oubl

        • 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 obv

          • 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

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

  • Port? (Score:2)

    by Hatta ( 162192 )
    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 (Score:4, Interesting)

    by rayde ( 738949 ) on Saturday October 30, 2004 @12:21AM (#10670433) Homepage
    don't forget the semi-sequel, Faceball 2000 [gbadvanzed.com]. it's a 4 player 3D fps for Gameboy!
    • 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 [mirsoft.info]
    • Faceball 2000 is a 2 player FPS for the SNES, you young whipper snapper.
      • 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 go

  • Wolfenstein (Score:5, Interesting)

    by gmuslera ( 3436 ) on Saturday October 30, 2004 @12:29AM (#10670468) Homepage Journal
    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.

  • Wink Murder anyone? (Score:3, Funny)

    by tonsofpcs ( 687961 ) <slashback&tonsofpcs,com> on Saturday October 30, 2004 @01:16AM (#10670634) Homepage Journal
    I wink at you, you die. Muhahaha.

    --
    /me looks for an Amiga port

  • Has anyone played NLSNIPES? (Score:1, Informative)

    by 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 [multiplayer-central.com]

    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
  • 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 - di

  • 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 creat
  • Ok, I'd say Ballblazer [mobygames.com] 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 th

  • Spasim, March, 1974 (Score:3, Informative)

    by Baldrson ( 78598 ) on Saturday October 30, 2004 @01:55AM (#10670732) Homepage Journal
    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 [geocities.com].

    Rumor has it that it is being restored for Internet play on cyber1 [cyber1.org] 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.

    • What an amazing coincidence. Having researched the matter last week when writing about the "3D Monster Maze [wikipedia.org]" 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 :)

      • 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.

        • 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 is 30 years old!?

    Yeah yeah, RTFA, I know :(
  • "could be considered a minimalistic graphical adventure"
    that's a nice way of saying the graphics suck.
  • Reminds me of the classic 3-Demon [dosgamesarchive.com], 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 ;)

    • 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) (Score:2, Interesting)

    by DJCF ( 805487 )
    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?
  • 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...)
    • Although I cannot find much, the first version of Maze for the Macintosh was MazeWars+, which was made by MacroMind ( link [rit.edu]) as a demonstration of their VideoWorks animation engine (link [uark.edu]). 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

  • How can anyone forget THIS [homestarrunner.com] classic??

    I mean, how can one not recognize the power of "YOUR HEAD A SPLODE!"
  • 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.
  • 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...
  • Personally I enjoyed Ninja Rabbit. Anyone remember that one?

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