Maze Game
One screen, four ghosts, and a great many imitators
Navigate a maze, collect its contents, avoid what hunts you. Pac-Man defined the form so completely that the British 8-bit market produced hundreds of variations, and the press needed a word for all of them.
The maze game confines play to a fixed labyrinth. The player clears it of something — dots, diamonds, boulders, keys — while pursuers move through the same corridors under their own logic. Everything hangs on route planning under pressure: the maze is known, the threat is mobile, and the interest lies in the geometry between them.
Pac-Man fixed the template in 1980 so firmly that the genre spent the decade in its shadow. On British 8-bit machines the maze game was a staple of budget publishing, in part because a single-screen playfield was cheap to build and cheap to hold in memory — an entire game could fit where a scrolling level would not.
The archive shows around 2,000 pages across some 1,300 issues, smaller than the broader action categories but consistently used across the whole period.
Fast facts
- Core loop: clear the maze without being caught.
- Playfield: fixed and fully visible, or a small scrolling window.
- Threat model: pursuers with distinct movement behaviours.
- Defining titles: Pac-Man, Dig Dug, Boulder Dash, Repton, Bomberman.
- Economics: cheap to produce, a mainstay of budget labels.
Genre conventions
- The power reversal: a temporary state in which the hunted becomes the hunter.
- Distinct pursuer behaviours: each enemy given its own rule, so the pattern reads as intent.
- Collect-to-clear: the level ends when the maze is emptied, not when a timer expires.
- Warp tunnels: edges that wrap, turning a bounded space into a loop.
- Escalation by speed: later levels rarely change layout, only pace.
The digging branch
A significant strand let the player reshape the maze instead of crossing it. Dig Dug tunnelled through soil; Boulder Dash and Repton added gravity, so excavation became a physics puzzle with lethal consequences. These are maze games in structure but puzzle games in feel, and the British press moved between both labels depending on which aspect a review wanted to emphasise.
Evolution
- 1980-82: Pac-Man and immediate imitators establish the form.
- 1983-85: the digging and gravity variants add puzzle depth.
- 1986-89: the genre settles into budget publishing on 8-bit machines.
- 1990s: survives mainly through Bomberman’s multiplayer reinvention.