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1. CURIOUS GEORGE AMAZING MAZE RACE MAP IMAGES SOFTWARE
2. CURIOUS GEORGE AMAZING MAZE RACE MAP IMAGES CODE

In the age of Atari, games had to be designed with incredible skill because the computer systems that ran them were so limited. Maze-navigating games were very common back in the late 1970s and early 1980s, but the method used to generate a maze varied, depending on the programmer. It seems the logic behind it has been lost forever.

CURIOUS GEORGE AMAZING MAZE RACE MAP IMAGES CODE

But they got more than they bargained for: they found a mystery bit of code they couldn’t explain. Like intrepid explorers of catacombs, Aycock and Copplestone sought curious relics inside Entombed. Inside they are finding clues to how the early days of video gaming came about, but also secrets that can help modern programmers with some of the problems they are facing today.

CURIOUS GEORGE AMAZING MAZE RACE MAP IMAGES SOFTWARE

The pair are among a growing number of “video game archaeologists” who are unearthing long forgotten pieces of software and pulling them apart. And because it had fallen into obscurity, it hadn’t been pulled apart and analysed in depth before – one the main reasons Aycock and his co-author Tara Copplestone at the University of York, UK, were drawn to Entombed as a subject to study over the other 500 games made for the Atari 2600 console. There was always something intriguing about Entombed, recalls John Aycock at the University of Calgary, in Alberta, Canada.

Released in 1982, Entombed was far from a best-seller and today it’s largely forgotten. A downward-scrolling, two-dimensional maze that players had to navigate expertly in order to evade the “clammy, deadly grip” of their zombie foes. But this was the chilling trial that faced players of Entombed, an Atari 2600 game, according to the instruction manual.

“You and your team of archaeologists have fallen into the ‘catacombs of the zombies’.” A miserable situation, to be sure.