#SNIPER 3D BLOODY DESCENT SOFTWARE#

Legend has it that the game got so popular it was banned from ARPANET because it chewed through too much data.

Maze was played across a network (via a PDP-10 mainframe) within MIT and over the ARPANET-an early version of the Internet-between MIT and Stanford. Perhaps coolest of all, other people could watch the eight-player action unfold on a Sutherland LDS-1 graphics display computer-one of the earliest cases of gaming as a spectator sport. Besides shooting each other, players could peek around corners and check a map to see where they were in the maze, and opponents looked smaller or larger according to distance.

They progressively added more features, and soon Maze became what we would now call a first-person shooter. Thompson and Infocom (the text adventure company) co-founder Dave Lebling then carried on the work at MIT the following year. They completed the would-be masterpiece during a work/study program at NASA's Ames Research Center. It was a two-player 3D maze game coded by three high schoolers-Greg Thompson, Steve Colley, and Howard Palmer. Later remade for several 1980s and early '90s machines under numerous variant titles such as Maze War, Maze Wars+, Super Maze Wars (the version I played to death on a Mac), Bus'd Out, Faceball 2000, and MIDI Maze, this first version of Maze was programmed on an Imlac PDS-4 minicomputer in 1973. Many of us encountered at least one that truly spoke to us, but together, these titles made it cool to shoot pixel-rendered dudes, dudettes, mutants, and weird alien creatures in the face. Minus '90s cult favorite DescentВ (because I personally consider it a flight combat shooter), these are the shooters that pushed the genre forward or held it back. Even Wolfenstein 3D had numerous predecessors within and without id.В And like the genres we've previously explored-a list including city builders, graphic adventures, kart histories, and simulation games-there have been many high and low points throughout this long, violent, gory history. Innovations came from multiple sources and often took years to catch on. Afterward, it was pushed forward only by id until Valve's Half-Life came along.Д«ut the reality behindВ FPSВ evolution is messier.

#SNIPER 3D BLOODY DESCENT SOFTWARE#

Many of us are familiar with the first-person shooter (FPS) creation myth-that it materialized fully formed in the minds of id Software founders John Carmack and John Romero shortly before they developed Wolfenstein 3D.

Sniper 3d bloody descent