MAZV / MINOTR / Maze02jun82 (Late Summer 1981)

If you're confused by the date (how can a prototype dated 6/2/82 be from late summer of 1981?) there's a simple explanation: MAZV, MINOTR, and Maze02jun82 are all actually the same file!  MAZV was the final development version of the original game which was created in August of 1981.  MAZV was then cloned to create a new development branch called MINOTR on October 1981 that had full documentation.  MINOTR was then cloned on June 2nd 1982 as Maze02jun82 to serve as another development branch to test a new timing patch that programmer Dave Hampton had come up with for Towering Inferno.  This branch was then changed to follow the MINOTR naming convention (Maze22jun82 became MINOTR1).  Got all of that?

This is the last version of Paul's unreleased maze game (called Maze, Amaze, and Minotaur at different points in development) that was worked on before being abandoned.  While the maze generation algorithm and the wall creation/destruction ideas were eventually incorporated into Entombed, many gameplay elements are unique to this prototype. 

There are 42 different variations in this demo, each sporting a different type of maze/gameplay combination.  There are both one and two player combinations like in Entombed, but here the two players have different abilities.  The first player is always positioned in the center of the screen vertically and can only move to the left and right.  However they can control which direction the maze scrolls by pushing up and down.  The second player can move freely in any direction but cannot control the maze to any extent.

The goal in the one player variations appears to be to simply move through the maze.  There are no zombies to attack the player and they control the scrolling so they cannot get pushed off the screen.  In the two player variations the goal is for the first player to touch the second player (referred to in the documentation as hunter/hunted).  When this happens the game will freeze.  Each players speed can be controlled by the difficultly switches (A is normal speed, B is fast speed).  It's also worth noting that the first player also cannot scroll the second player off the screen.

As in Entombed, the player can build or destroy walls with the push of a button, but it works a bit differently in this demo.  Here, depending on the variation, the player performs only one type of action.  There are variations where the button does nothing, builds, destroys, or does a 'reverse'.  Reverse is just a fancy way of saying that if there's a wall the button destroys it and if there's a space the button builds a wall.  This is how it works in Entombed (called a Make-Break) but in this demo the player can do each action an infinite number of times.

Variations zero through twenty take place in a randomly generated maze, similar to Entombed.  Variations twenty one through forty two however take place in what the documentation describes as 'an obstacle course' which basically means the maze now consists of small rectangles and squares instead of long twisting passages.  These variations were created by Paul to test the feasibility of using the maze generating algorithm in Towering Inferno for procedural floor plan creations.

One final thing worth noting about this prototype is that each player is a simple square with an arrow that points in the direction they're facing (so you know which wall you're interacting with) instead of a stick figure as in Entombed.

PAN stands for Paul Allen Newell	You can go either up or down in this prototype as the maze doesn't scroll automatically
Creating a wall	Lost in the maze...

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