When Namco’s American partner first saw its new coin-op in 1980, Robert Mullane, the president of Bally, which owned Midway, wanted nothing to do with it. “It’s silly,” he said. “Anyway, who plays a maze game?” Two years later there were 100,000 Pac-Man machines in American arcades. In Britain the home-computer copies came so fast that in 1983 Computer & Video Games reviewed them by the batch, under the heading “Maze Games”.
A maze game confines the player to a fixed labyrinth, usually on a single screen. The player clears it of something, whether dots, gold or diamonds, while pursuers move through the same corridors under rules of their own. Because the whole maze is in view, the game is about routes: where the hunters are heading, and which corridor will still be open when you get there.
Fast facts
- Core loop: clear the maze without being caught.
- Before Pac-Man: Atari’s Gotcha (1973), one player chasing another through a maze; Sega’s Head On (1979), driving round a maze collecting dots.
- The template: Pac-Man (Namco, 1980).
- Digging variants: Dig Dug (1982), Boulder Dash (1984), Repton (1985).
- Bombs: Bomberman, sold on the Spectrum as Eric and the Floaters (1984).
- British vocabulary: “maze game” for anything in the Pac-Man mould; “maze race” for some variants.
Before Pac-Man
The pieces existed before 1980. Wireframe traces the chase to Atari’s Gotcha (1973), a coin-op in which one player pursued another through a maze, and the dots to Sega’s Head On (1979), in which the player drove round a maze collecting them. Looking back at Head On in 1997, Saturn Power summed it up as “two cars, dots, annoying sounds, and a maze”.
Pac-Man’s rules
Pac-Man added character. Toru Iwatani wanted “each ghostly enemy to have a specific character and its own particular movements, so they weren’t all just chasing after Pac-Man in single file”. The four ghosts each pick their target in a different way (the ghost AI entry explains how), and four times a level they break off and head for their own corners. A power pill in each corner turns the ghosts blue for a few seconds, so that the hunted can hunt. When the maze is cleared it refills, and the game runs faster.
Those rules became the genre’s conventions: a maze cleared by collecting, pursuers with different habits, a short reversal of the chase, and difficulty that rises with speed while the layout stays the same.
The British maze game
On British home computers Pac-Man usually appeared under another name. In October 1982 Sinclair User‘s round-up of new tapes included a “maze game called Puck-man”, and Byte Man, the title game of a three-game tape at £2.95, in which “a cheerful-looking monster chases you round a maze littered with food pills”. Computer & Video Games’ Book of Reviews in 1983 gave maze games a section of their own. It tried “the batch of Spectrum maze games” and judged Gulpman, with fifteen mazes and a laser gun for shooting the chasers, the most playable at £4.95. It complained that Abersoft’s Mazeman lacked sound and bonus fruit, and that on a Spectrum without a joystick, “Pacman without a joystick is rather like Blackpool without the illuminations”. On the BBC Micro and Atom, Acornsoft’s Snapper was “a version of Pacman”, in which Snapper’s mouth falls open after a power pill and “he can then eat the ghosts until it shuts again”.
By 1984 the idea was being stretched in other directions. Sinclair User noted that maze games “such as Pac-man, have not escaped the eye of software houses keen to think of new plots. The munch-munch of the Pac-Man has been replaced by ponderings, such as ‘Where is the treasure?’” Its examples were Quicksilva’s Ant Attack, Maziacs and Halls of the Things, a maze game of collecting rings of power that it credited with starting “a craze for the so called all-graphics adventures”. When CRASH reviewed Hudson’s Eric and the Floaters that year, a reviewer liked leaving bombs behind to explode round a corner because it “makes for a different maze game”.
Digging the maze
A second line let the player reshape the maze. In Namco’s Dig Dug (1982) the hero digs his own tunnels and pumps up the monsters waiting in them, or drops rocks on them. Peter Liepa’s Boulder Dash (1984) and Tim Tyler’s Repton (1985) for the BBC Micro added gravity: every tunnel dug could bring rocks down, so clearing a cave became a puzzle with lethal consequences.
Bombs and parties
Bomberman began in 1983 as a small one-player maze game for Japanese home computers, and was sold on the Spectrum in 1984 as Eric and the Floaters. Its later console versions, with power-ups and up to five players on the PC Engine, turned the maze into a party game, and after Konami absorbed Hudson it revived the series with Super Bomberman R in 2017.
Sources
- Wireframe issue 40, June 2020: Pac-Man’s design and ghost behaviour; Gotcha (1973) and Head On (1979); Iwatani on giving each ghost its own character.
- Saturn Power issue 1, June 1997: Sega Memorial Selection review (Head On, 1979).
- Sinclair User issue 7, October 1982: compilation tapes with “Puck-man” and “Byte Man”.
- Computer & Video Games Book of Reviews, 1983: “Maze Games” section (Gulpman, Mazeman, Spectrum Spectres, Snapper, the Atari Pac-Man).
- Sinclair User issue 27, June 1984: maze games and “all-graphics adventures” (Ant Attack, Maziacs, Halls of the Things).
- See the Pac-Man entry for Mullane’s remark, the 100,000 machines and the rules (Video Games, August 1982; Edge issue 65, December 1998); the ghost AI entry for the ghosts’ targets; and the Dig Dug, Boulder Dash, Repton and Bomberman entries for those games and CRASH’s review of Eric and the Floaters.