Documented to the year
A wireframe maze becomes a hunt between linked computers
Students working at a NASA research center turned a wireframe corridor display into a game where players stalked one another across cabled-together machines, an early ancestor of the first-person shooter.
Usually dated to 1973; the program kept changing as it spread between institutions
Entry 22 of 164 in the record
What happened
Steve Colley had been drawing three-dimensional shapes on an Imlac minicomputer at Ames when he tried moving a viewpoint through a maze of corridors instead. Howard Palmer and Greg Thompson took the idea further by connecting two of the machines so each player occupied the other's maze. Opponents appeared as floating eyeballs, visible down a corridor for the moment before someone fired. Everything about it, the first-person view, the map, the ambush and the score, would be recognizable to a player fifty years later.
Copies travelled with students to other institutions, notably MIT, and versions ran over ARPANET links, generating some of the first complaints about game traffic on a research network. Around the same time the education system PLATO, in Illinois, hosted Empire, a multiplayer space war that logged enormous amounts of play. Neither could be sold, because the machines they needed belonged to universities and government laboratories. Both showed that the interesting thing about a network was not data transfer but the presence of other people.
The world at the time
Network computing in 1973 meant a few dozen research sites joined by leased lines, with access restricted to people affiliated with a funded project. Graphics terminals were rare and expensive. Playing games on such equipment was tolerated informally, sometimes celebrated as a way to learn the hardware, and sometimes shut down by administrators watching the bill.
Historical significance
Networked multiplayer play was demonstrated two decades before it became a commercial product, and by students with no market to sell into. The design vocabulary they arrived at, a first-person viewpoint moving through connected rooms with other players inside it, was rediscovered rather than invented in the 1990s.
What it changed
The program was ported repeatedly over following decades and became a standard reference in accounts of the shooter's origins. Its more important legacy was cultural. Cohorts of programmers learned that shared virtual space was possible, and several went on to work at companies where that experience mattered once consumer networks arrived.
Sources consulted
- Replay: The History of Video Games
- The Ultimate History of Video Games
- Electronic game
Listed sources support the facts in this entry. Wording throughout is original to this archive. Read more about how entries are researched in sources and methodology.
Last reviewed September 2, 2026. Report a correction