[game_preservation] Maze Wars video

[Henry Lowood]

Devin, Devin, Devin ...

YouTube!?  There's an archived copy in our project's very own the 
Preserving Virtual Worlds collection.  A little love please. :-)
http://www.archive.org/details/vw_mazewar-on-alto-deposition
Many thanks to Bruce Damer for saving this important documentation.  If 
you download it, the quality is much better than the YouTube version, if 
I say so myself.

Henry

Devin Monnens wrote:

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

>

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

> <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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-- 
Henry Lowood
Curator for History of Science & Technology Collections;
     Film & Media Collections
HRG, Green Library
557 Escondido Mall, Stanford University Libraries
Stanford CA 94305-6004 USA
http://www.stanford.edu/~lowood
lowood at stanford.edu; 650-723-4602

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