Game 150: Maze Master (1983)

 

 

Maze Master

United States
Human Engineered Software (developer and publisher)

Released 1983 for Commodore 64

Date Started: 21 June 2014
Date Ended: 21 June 2014

Total Hours: 5

Difficulty: Hard (4/5)
Final Rating: 12
Ranking at Time of Posting: 10/148 (7%)

Ranking at Game #456: 39/456 (9%)

 
In Maze Master, we have a “missing link” in the evolution of first-person, multi-character RPGs—a genre that started on the PLATO system with Moria in 1975. Moria led to Oubliette (1978), which was adapted (or plagiarized, depending on your bent) for commercial release on personal computers as Wizardry (1981).

That Wizardry in turn inspired The Bard’s Tale (1985) seems obvious to anyone who’s played both games (I commented on it in my March 2010 post), but I didn’t know until now that there was a stop along the way. Maze Master (1983) was the first original game by Michael Cranford, the primary developer and programmer of The Bard’s Tale. The Wizardry influence couldn’t be clearer, from the game menu to the wireframe dungeon to the combat and spell mechanics.

The party has just entered the dungeon.

But the C64 cartridge on which it was issued couldn’t quite accommodate the complexity of Wizardry, so we actually get a lot less game: three characters instead of six; two classes instead of eight; four attributes instead of six; 18 spells instead of 50; four weapon, armor, and shield types instead of dozens. There are no races or alignments, no class restrictions on equipment, no way to pool or trade gold between characters, no treasure chests in the dungeons, and no items to find and identify after combat. Maze Master distills dungeon crawling into its most basic elements: create a party, equip them, send them into a leveled tile-based dungeon, amass gold and experience, level up.

Character creation is a simple process of giving a name to your character, after which the game rolls random figures between 3 and 18 for strength, intelligence, dexterity, and constitution. Constitution serves as the hit point maximum. Once you see the scores, you decide whether to assign the character to the warrior or wizard classes. If you don’t like the attribute rolls, your only option is to finish the creation process, then delete the character and try again.

Creating a new character. I think I'll keep this one.

Gold is also assigned randomly, but each starting character generally has enough for the cheapest weapon (a sword) and the cheapest suit of armor (leather). You might also have enough for the cheapest shield. When you've collected more funds, there are three other types of items in each category. For instance, better weapons are, in order, magic swords, rune-maces, and wrathblades. Armor progresses from leather to chain to magic armor to a mithril coat. There are also four types of expensive magic items: the staff of light, the ring of accuracy, the amulet of healing, and the “hawk blazon.”

Buying items. You need the manual to tell you what the associated numbers mean, and how much each item costs.

With some basic equipment in place, the party enters the wireframe dungeon. Each level is 20 x 20, and you start at coordinates 0, 0 on Level 1. The manual doesn’t specify how many levels there are in the dungeon, but I suspect (as below) that there are five. Every space is used, at least on Level 1. Mapping is a necessity due to secret doors and one-way doors that befoul your attempts to navigate. Here, the game copies Wizardry down to the use of the (K)ick key to get through doors and the existence of a "Light" spell that reveals secret doors (though if you suspect one is present, you can just kick right through it whether you see it or not). You can maneuver with a joystick, but you still need the keyboard for combat and spellcasting.

Combat arrives at fixed squares and random encounters. One difference from Wizardry is that time passes while standing still, and enemies can come upon you if you don’t have (P)ause active, a dynamic that we later see in The Bard’s Tale. The fixed squares always contain the same type of enemy, but the game randomly determines how many you face; on Level 1, it’s always 1–4. Sometimes they surprise the party and get a free attack round. When it’s the party’s turn, the only options are to attack with a (W)eapon or cast a (S)pell—no defense, sneaking, using an item, or fleeing. After each character has designated his choice, they all execute at once. 

Pondering my combat options.

Maze Master features a selection of 18 spells, some combat (e.g., "Fireball," "Flame Blast," "Mind Fist," "Shield") and some non-combat (e.g., "Light," "Phase Wall," "Teleport," the mechanics of which work exactly like MALOR in Wizardry). Each spell requires between 1 and 6 spell points, and starting characters only have 3 or 4 spell points, so you’re limited a bit at the outset. Much like Wizardry, spell points only recharge upon returning to the surface. You don't have to memorize any arcane names, but you do need the manual to tell you what number corresponds to what spell.

Using the "Locate" spell to figure out where I am.

At level 1, the combats are crazy deadly. I had four parties in a row wiped out within a couple of encounters. Enemies were easily capable of killing characters in one blow. A slain character immediately disappears from the party forever. There’s no “resurrect” spell or other mechanism; you either have to replace characters or "reload." With tiny experience rewards of 8–30 per battle on Level 1, it would take ridiculously good luck to amass 1,024 to reach Level 2 without a lot of “reloading.” In about 2 hours of play in which I abused save states to keep from dying (see below for a good reason), I only got up to 696 experience points.

I put “reload” in quotes because there’s no “save” mechanism in the game. Instead, upon returning to the surface, you can “examine” the character to get a 21-character code, copy it down, and enter the code the next time you start the game to “restore” the character in the same condition.  The characters don’t seem to conform to any obvious pattern for the attributes and such—they’re not hex code—so I’m not sure if there’s a way to cheat the game by creating mighty characters from the start. The code system is based on the character, not the game, so it creates a weird dynamic where if a character dies, you could restore an earlier incarnation of him but maintain the improved experience levels and gold of the characters who survived. Or you could create a new party that includes the best versions of characters from multiple previous parties.

Viewing the character screen while on the surface gives you a code to record for "reloading" the character.

The main quest of the game is to defeat a BALROG, “a villainous creature bent on the destruction of the liege and his realm.” (There is no other information about either the liege or the realm.) The BALROG is supposedly protected by a magical chamber, and the party needs to solve some kind of riddle to get through. There are clues on each level giving some aspect of the riddle. On Level 1, I found a clue that read, “I have laid 3 clues to bring you to me.” Assuming that isn’t one of them and they each occur on a unique level, there are probably 5 dungeon levels in the game.

The first puzzle clue.

Unfortunately, I ran into a game-breaking bug that prevents me from making any substantial progress. (It might be a consequence of emulation rather than the original game, but the result is the same either way.) To periodically rest and heal, buy new equipment, level up, and get the save codes, the party must return to the surface. But the game keeps putting an endless string of random encounters right on the stairway going up. When I finish the combat, there’s no way to activate the square to return to the surface, and if I leave and return, I just get another combat. I used save states to allow myself to win multiple combats in a row, but even after dozens of them, they never stopped and I never got the option to use the stairway. This happened to several consecutive parties and several consecutive sorties with the same party.

(If anyone wants to try to replicate it, it doesn't happen immediately upon entering the dungeon. I can return to the surface if I just explore a few squares. It only happens after I've been in the dungeon for a little while and fought a few combats. I didn't investigate long enough to identify a specific "trigger point.")

No matter how many enemies I fought on the stairway, I couldn't get up the stairs.

Abusing VICE emulator save states to keep my party alive, I mapped the entire Level 1, just to make sure there wasn’t some plot-related reason for the problem above--perhaps an alternate staircase or something. I found the stairs down, lots of random encounters, and nothing else in the level, but when I returned to the stairs back to the surface, I always just got another string of endless encounters and no stairs.

The map of Level 1. At some point, I stopped recording the locations of fixed combats. There were a lot more than the symbols (!) indicate.

It would have been fun to be the only person online with a winning Maze Master screen to his credit, but I don’t see how it’s possible with this bug, so I have to move on. In a GIMLET, I can only award the game 12 points, with 1s and 2s in every category except “NPCs,” where it gets a 0. This is understanding that I didn’t get to experience the BALROG, the puzzle, or the endgame.

The game was published by HES, or Human Engineered Software, a company known more for educational and business software than games. As Stephen Strange points out in his "Archeogaming" blog, the company’s lack of experience with RPGs shows in its packaging and “clinical,” image-free instruction manual.

Perhaps the ugliest manual cover in CRPG history.

In a 2011 interview, Cranford was fairly candid about Wizardry as the inspiration for Maze Master. He criticized the programming language used by Wizardry and said he felt that he could “blow Wizardry away” but suggested that limitations imposed by HES kept him from realizing this goal. He blamed HES’s marketing for the game’s poor performance and noted that “they could have had the first Bard’s Tale if they had a clue.” HES’s ineptitude probably explains why I can’t find a smidgen of evidence for any contemporary coverage or reviews of the game. Even in the modern era, in which every obscure title has some champion, there are no YouTube videos of Maze Master or discussions of it on RPGCodex. Vesuvius at “The RPG & Strategy Gamer” did cover the game about a year ago, but he didn’t get any further than I did. (He doesn’t mention the encounter/stairway problem, but frankly it doesn’t sound like he cared enough for the game to invest enough time to even discover it.)

In 1983, the C64 wasn’t yet the RPG powerhouse that it would become. (It had only been around for a little over a year.) Wizardry wouldn’t get a port to it until 1987, which makes the existence of Maze Master marginally understandable. But the funny thing is that HES also published the first commercial version of Oubliette for the C64 in 1983. It must have been obvious to everyone that Oubliette was a far better game. Perhaps this partly explains the company's failure to promote Maze Master.

I can’t find any evidence that HES published another RPG after 1983, but of course Michael Cranford did. This wasn’t his first credited game, but the others—Donkey Kong (1981), Super Zaxxon (1982), and Story Machine (1982)—were just ports of existing games. This is the first on which he’s credited as the “author.” Two years later, working with a larger team, he developed The Bard’s Tale for Interplay, and the rest is history. He has credits on The Bard’s Tale II (1986), Centauri Alliance (1990), and Dark Seed (1992) before he departed the gaming industry.

In other news, I’m not getting much of anywhere with Dragonflight, but I’m continuing to try. I’m not sure if I’ll amass enough material on that game before moving on to FallThru. I have Moria slated as the next "old" game, but I haven't won it yet, and I might change my mind and decide to give it a few more tries before writing the entry. We'll see.

****

Later addendum:

An anonymous comment led me to the work of a lunatic named Paul Nelsen, who not only took the time to map each of the five levels (I was right!) but also figured out how to crack the character codes so that you can create the character you want. It involves converting the actual values to binary, then flipping bits in particular positions, then converting the binary to hex, then arranging the various hex codes in the right order. I don't know if he cracked it by examining the source code or by trial and error, but either way it was a lot of effort for a game that's a lot of difficult slogging through the dungeon and little reward.

With his cheat sheet and maps, I created three super characters and headed directly for the balrog encounter. If you have the maps in hand, it's only a couple of dozen steps. There are a few fixed encounters along the way, but they can be easily avoided by running away.

Hey, I'm saving my strength for the balrog.

The other clues ended up being as follows:

• "I am destiny personified."
• "Toward the NE beware the stop else magic tries to make you drop."
• "My name is in the lower 4 maps."

When you finally get to the balrog's door on the last level, the voice says "Answer this riddle to pass--I lie ahead for every man that is within the master plan. I am________."

If you couldn't figure it out from the riddle, parts of the walls on Levels 2, 3, 4, and 5 do indeed spell out the answer: FATE.

On the other side of the door is the balrog, who's a tough customer. He deals almost 150 points of damage per round and never misses, even with my maxed-out armor class. Every new level in the game gives you a bonus of 0-2 points to a random attribute. Levels take 1,024 experience points. If a regular character got lucky and had 18 constitution at character creation, always got 2 points on leveling up, and it always went into constitution, it would take 67,584 experience points to get a constitution high enough to survive one blow from the balrog, and this isn't possible because the max experience in the game is 65,535.

So you mostly have to get lucky with your own attack rolls. After a few reloads (of the save state; in the real game, you'd have to re-create the characters from the menu, re-enter the dungeon, and find the balrog again), I managed to kill him with only one character slain. Once you do so, you get a brief congratulatory message (below) and a directive to seek the balrog's allies in Adventure 2: Shadow Snare.

Did the game forget its own name at the end? Was it originally supposed to be called Adventure? Or is "adventure" just generic here, as in the second Maze Master adventure? Either way, Mr. Nelsen's documents note that Shadow Snare was the original title of The Bard's Tale, which is confirmed on a number of sites. Note that a powerful magic artifact you get at the end of The Bard's Tale is called a "spectre snare," and the puzzle rooms in The Bard's Tale II are called "snares of death." Clearly, Michael Cranford liked the word "snare."

So I couldn't win the game, but at least I could show you the winning screen. Back to the regular program.