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posted by n1 on Saturday May 23 2015, @03:30AM   Printer-friendly
from the so-it-wasn't-cod:mw? dept.

It started as an experiment. Steve Colley had just figured out how to rotate a cube on the screen when Howard Palmer suggested they could make a three-dimensional maze.

The year was 1973. They were high school seniors in a work-study program with NASA, tasked with testing the limits of the Imlac PDS-1 and PDS-4 minicomputers. Their maze program flickered into life with simple wireframe graphics and few of the trappings of modern games. You could walk around in first person, looking for a way out of the maze, and that's about it. There were no objects or virtual people. Just a maze.

But Maze would evolve over the summer and the years that followed. Soon two people could occupy the maze together, connected over separate computers. Then they could shoot each other and even peek around corners. Before long, up to eight people could play in the same maze, blasting their friends across the ARPANET — a forebear to the internet. Two decades before id Software changed the game industry with Wolfenstein 3D and Doom, Colley, Palmer and MIT students Greg Thompson and Dave Lebling invented the first-person shooter.

This is the story of Maze, the video game that lays claim to perhaps more "firsts" than any other — the first first-person shooter, the first multiplayer networked game, the first game with both overhead and first-person view modes, the first game with modding tools and more.

http://www.polygon.com/features/2015/5/21/8627231/the-first-first-person-shooter

 
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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by shortscreen on Saturday May 23 2015, @06:41AM

    by shortscreen (2252) on Saturday May 23 2015, @06:41AM (#186779) Journal

    in the early days, a guy with no formal education nor google could figure stuff out and almost get famous.

    Last year I read "The Untold History of Japanese Game Developers" which had a lot of interviews with game developers who had gotten into the business in the '80s. In one particular story that stood out, a man graduated from business school and went to work at a company that sold car accessories. The closest thing he had to experience with computers was having used a typewriter. One day he suggested to his boss "hey, what if we sold software too?" His boss basically says "OK, why don't YOU give it a shot?" So the guy spends a bunch of money on an 8-bit NEC microcomputer, disassembles an entire game by hand to see how it works, and then writes his own game in Z80 assembly language, all in a few months time. (The game was published but didn't sell many copies. He went on to write a series of books on programming.)

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