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1 entry of 164 involving Greg Thompson

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1970-1979 The 1970s

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.

Key facts and significance Hide details
Region
North America
Period
The 1970s

Why it matters

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.

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