Maze War (1973) is one of the first videogames to create a 3D world from a first-person perspective – a key moment in world-building, game design and networked play.
In 1969, the US Department of Defence introduced the first online network, ARPANET. Designed to withstand a nuclear attack during the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union, it allowed information to be shared across multiple computers in multiple US states. The nuclear attack never came, but networked gaming was born.
Maze War started life as a project by high school students Steve Colley, Greg Thompson and Howard Palmer during work experience at NASA. In 1974, Thompson and Dave Lebling (who went on to create Zork) added shooting and network capability.
Up to eight people could play Maze War remotely via ARPANET, navigating a maze and shooting players across the country like a game of digital tag. It was so popular that the US Department of Defence supposedly tried to ban it from ARPANET as the frequency of matches overloaded the bandwidth of the early network.
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