[game_preservation] Maze Wars video

[Devin Monnens]

Here is a video of Maze Wars running on the Alto:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7chDIySXK2Q&NR=1

I LOL'd when he stuck the disk drive into the thing - that is the size of
three stacked pizza's!

The video could be a LITTLE bit better by describing the controls
(particularly what happens when one player 'shoots' the other). I think this
is good to demonstrate as evidence as it lets us know exactly the kinds of
questions we might have about the game (certainly you can see the hands
typing as they play, but we don't know exactly what they're using as
controls...I'm suspecting WASD for movement).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maze_wars

The book I'm currently reading (despite my supposed focus on research for
another paper...) is Dealers of Lightning. About 1/3 of the way through,
Hiltzik begins discussing the (in)famous "Spacewar" article in Rolling
Stone. However, before that, there is an interesting comment:

[On Jack Goldman visiting the PARC facility before the article was run]

"The lights would all be lit and dozens of people around, even if it was
nine or ten at night. Often they were playing computer games. Now, just
remember, in those days computer games were not what they are today. This
was a new thing. These guys were literally inventing computer games and
learning how to use the machine." (154)

Now there's no discussion about what kinds of games they played, and the
Spacewar article doesn't even talk about them playing games at PARC (just
that they wanted the Dynabook to run Spacewar):

http://www.wheels.org/spacewar/stone/rolling_stone.html

I think this develops an interesting question: What, if anything, were the
PARC guys playing in 1972? If they were "inventing computer games", there
has to be some record of this. What I'm most interested in is whether they
were just making variations of Spacewar (and perhaps what kind those were).
Peter Deutsch, one of the Spacewar guys, was working at PARC at the time -
maybe he knows. I just find it pretty odd that out of all the games they
could have made from 1962 to 1972, Spacewar (and variations) is the only one
that gets mentioned (well, aside from Tennis for Two). There's a solar
system lander game that gets mentioned, along with versions of Draughts,
Checkers (and of course Chess), but other than that...nothing! Why IS that?
(incidentally, that's another of my thesis questions - for another paper I'm
not supposed to be working on yet :P)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_history_of_video_games

-- 
The sleep of Reason produces monsters.

"Until next time..."
Captain Commando
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