Maze (genre)
Maze (in German: Maze ), also a labyrinth game, is an arcade and computer game genre that describes games such as Pac-Man or Boulder Dash , in which the player has to move through a maze to avoid enemies to chase, avoid them, find treasure or, as in the arcade game Crush Roller, just to repaint it.
The majority of these games come from the 80s or the time of the 8- and 16-bit computers, when there were hardly any possibilities to display extended 3D graphics and animations. Today, games of this kind often appear only as freeware , as mobile games , as Roms for emulators or in the form of various retro compilations that combine entire collections of these games.
There were also 3-D maze games early on, especially Pac-Man-like games for home computers , but these were not as successful and usually very sluggish in their image structure. The first Maze games appeared around 1973, such as Maze War and Gotcha ( Atari ).
As with other genres, there is overlap with other genres. Databases sometimes categorize differently and sometimes (additionally) according to perspective. The most common classification is labyrinth / maze . Further names are arcade game, retro game, action game, collect-'em-up, skill game, various games and others. From time to time there are sub-categories such as Pac-Man games or Collect'em-up (vehicle).
See also
literature
- Clara Fernández-Vara: Labyrinth and Maze . In: Friedrich von Borries (Ed.): Space Time Play. Computer games, architecture and urbanism; the next level . Birkhäuser, Basel 2007, pp. 74–87, ISBN 978-3-7643-8414-2 .
Web links
- Maze games in TheLegacy database
- Maze games at arcade history
- Maze games at IMDb