Game 549: Pathways into Darkness (1993) and BRIEF: Minotaur: The Labyrinths of Crete (1992)

     

But do they journey into the realms?

       

Pathways into Darkness

United States

Bungie Software Products Corporation (developer and publisher)

Released 1993 for Macintosh

Date Started: 25 April 2025 

      

For a company that is primarily famous today for launching the Xbox (2001's Halo), Bungie oddly spent its first decade resolutely faithful to the Macintosh. Pathways into Darkness was the company's response to Wolfenstein 3D (1992) for DOS, and I believe that Pathways is the first first-person Macintosh game with continuous movement (as opposed to tiled movement). [Ed. Nope. That would be David Smith's The Colony from 1988.] This landmark status convinced me to play it despite its extremely thin CRPG credentials.

   

Chicago-based Bungie was launched in 1991 by Alexander Seropian, who had already published Gnop!, a variant of Pong, as freeware in 1990. His next title was Operation: Desert Storm (1991), a top-down tank game. That same year, Seropian met Jason Jones at college. Jones had written a multiplayer combat game for the Apple II in 1988, which Seropian offered to publish (as a Macintosh port). The result was Minotaur: The Labyrinths of Crete (1991), which was successful enough that Jones was soon a partner in the company.

     

(Minotaur is listed on some sites as an RPG, but it really isn't. I nonetheless checked it out prior to starting Pathways, and I offer a BRIEF at the bottom of this entry.) 

         

The manual cover is explained by the backstory.

        

Pathways started as an attempt to make a first-person version of Minotaur, but the pair soon decided that they wanted a single-player game. They went through several plots before settling on the Lovecraftian story presented by the game: An alien race called the Jjaro has contacted the President of the United States with a dire warning. Millions of years ago, an ancient, powerful, malevolent being arrived on Earth with the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs. Buried deep in the Earth, the ancient god slumbered for millennia but has recently begun to stir. Strange creatures have been seen in the forests of the Yucatan peninsula, around a strange pyramid that does not seem to be of Mesoamerican origin. There's a mention that Hitler sent soldiers to investigate the pyramid just before World War II, but none ever returned.

   

The Jjaro say that they are on their way to Earth to deal with the creature permanently, but they won't arrive for a few years, and the alien god will be fully awake in a week. Their recommended solution is to send a strike team as deep into the pyramid as possible, where they can detonate a nuclear device, stunning and burying the creature. Two days later, an elite team is airlifted to the Yucatan. The player is a member of this team, but a parachute accident leaves him off-course, unconscious, and bereft of equipment except for a flashlight and a survival knife. He gets himself together and enters the pyramid, presumably a couple of hours behind the rest of his team. He has five days to find the device, activate it, and escape the pyramid before it detonates. A secondary goal is to find ancient treasures and return them for study.

      

The game begins.

     

Gameplay begins with no character creation. The player faces a long hallway on the ground floor. The interface is arranged in four windows: character, inventory, messages, and exploration, each of which can be resized and rearranged. That's good in theory, especially if you want to increase the side of the exploration window to experience a greater sense of immersion, but you really do need to see the other windows much of the time. I wish the game had a full-screen exploration option with a button that called up and dismissed the other windows as needed.

     

Movement is with the arrow keys or numberpad. The SPACE bar attacks. I find the numberpad the easier of the movement options, as strafing is mapped to 7 and 9. On the main keyboard, strafing is mapped to Z and X, so you have to use both hands at once to get all your movement options. 

   

Movement and turning are both smooth and well-timed, neither too fast nor too slow. The graphics are crisp and the controls responsive. Tutorials pop up as you explore to help get you accustomed to the game. A "Map" command brings up a very clear automap. Overall, Pathways doesn't feel like a "first" anything.

      

An excellent automap.

      

The first level, titled "Ground Floor," is small. In the first large chamber, next to a blue rune that I'm not sure what to do with, I find the body of a German soldier, complete with a copy of Mein Kampf. He also has a Walther P4 pistol and four magazines. The manual warns the player to conserve ammunition, so I keep my knife active for now.

     

The game eases the player into its mechanics.

     

The level branches into two directions, each leading to a different ladder, both going up. I thought I was supposed to be going down! Each ladder has a red rune in front of it; red runes are the only places in the game that you can save.

    

One of the rooms has the level's only enemy, this red thing on two legs with a mouth on the top of its head and a tongue coming out of it. He dies with two knife thrusts, so that's not so bad. As I walk over his body, the game tells me that it's a "headless."

      

My first kill.

      

I head up one ladder to a level titled "Never Stop Firing," except the game has already made me paranoid about using ammunition, so I do my best to get through it with my knife. This is difficult because the level is swarming with headless, sometimes appearing three or four at a time. They have a ranged attack, some kind of poison spitball.

       

A few seconds of combat.

      

Amid multiple reloads as I test different strategies, I come to realize that timing is vital. The headless always wait a few seconds between spit balls, so if I can dodge one, I can run forward and stab the creature before he spits another one. This is of course harder when there are multiple headless, or when they're close and I don't have enough time to strafe away. Success involves a lot of keyboard agility, which I have never possessed. Enemies move as fast as the player, so once they have your scent, there's no outrunning them.

    

The level is quite large, with a lot of stone doors that open as I approach, but only from one side or the other. There are two chains that must be pulled to open a room in the far north, which has a yellow crystal. Crystals are magical objects. They come in a variety of colors, and according to the manual, yellow ones let you speak to the dead. When I ready it, it gives me a power bar underneath my health bar. "Dead" must mean human dead, because the dead headless have nothing to say.

       

Finding the yellow crystal.

       

In addition to the headless, there's a single "zombie" (the game's term) on the level. I later encounter a lot more of them. They're particularly annoying because they cannot be stabbed fast enough to kill them before they get to throw at least one bone at you.

   

I need to heal frequently, and the only way to heal so far is to rest. This of course takes time, and if you do it too often, you run the risk of not completing the mission in the five-day window. This is another thing the game has made me paranoid about.

    

Those red runes show up rarely enough that taking screenshots is a big problem. Basilisk has no keyboard shortcut for screenshots, so I have to use the Windows snipping tool. I can't be fumbling with that while I'm trying to avoid spitballs from headless.

     

This happened while I was adjusting it from "rectangle" to "window."

     

"Never Stop Firing" has no more ladders that I can find, so I head back down to "Ground Floor" and try the other ladder, which leads to a level called "Lock and Load." It has a lot more headless and zombies, and there are times that I have to use the Walther. The game's claim to RPG status, incidentally, is that each weapon has a skill level associated with it. I started at "Expert" level in "Melee Combat," the Colt .45 pistol (which I have not found), and the M-16 rifle (which I have also not found). After I fired a couple of shots with the Walther P4, it showed up in the proficiencies list with "Beginner" next to it. These skills otherwise haven't budged. The only other type of "character development" is that you earn points for certain plot milestones, which add to your maximum health.

   

I'm only halfway through "Lock and Load" when I find another ladder up. I figure it's a better use of time to just take ladders when you discover them, so soon I'm on "They May Be Slow . . ." Amidst more headless and zombies, I find the body of a German soldier and use the yellow crystal. This pulls up a keyword-based dialogue screen. The manual says everyone responds to NAME and DEATH.

   

The German laments that he no longer remembers his name or his life, but he had seen people pass through the room since he died. When I press further, he tells me that someone walked through the wall on the other side of the room. I give it a try, and sure enough, it's illusory. There's a blue crystal on the other side.

      

This game has a bleak view of the afterlife.

      

Again, before I complete the level, I find another ladder. It goes up to ". . . But They're Hungry." I'm immediately attacked by some kind of wraith, which seems immune to my knife and bullets. I imagine I'll have to use the blue crystal on him, but after my death, I wrap it up for the night.

     

You can barely see him, but he's there.

      

I'm not in much of a position to judge what makes a good first-person shooter, but Pathways into Darkness feels like an excellent one to me. Despite somewhat limited graphics (not for the era, just in general), it manages to be atmospheric, visceral, gory, and a bit terrifying. Not since Dungeons of Daggorath have I felt such dread at the sound of enemies in the next room, or felt that I really needed to "get gud" lest I run out of time or ammo.

   

I really could do without the time limit, though. Mostly because of resting, it's already 14:47 on Sunday, about 8.5 hours after I started. I don't know whether that's good or bad for where I am, but even if you tell me it's okay, I'm never going to be able to take my eye off that clock.

   

I'm not so far into the game that I'm loath to start over if I've already screwed up or missed some key game mechanic. Hints are welcome.

   

Time so far: 3 hours

     

******

       

Despite the name, no minotaur appears in the game.

       

Minotaur: The Labyrinths of Crete

United States

Bungie Software Products Corporation (developer and publisher)

Released 1992 for Macintosh

Rejected for: No meaningful single-player version; no character development

    

Minotaur is a simple, RPG-ish game in which, as the manual has it, "two or more players on different computers are thrown into a huge, randomly generated maze and through the use of various magical and mundane items attempt to find and kill each other." As the computers must be connected by a serial cable or AppleTalk, the game is nearly impossible to emulate today, although this video shows a couple of players who managed to do it recently. 

    

"Character creation."

      

Character creation consists of assigning a name and distributing 60 points between brawn, agility, and lore. When the game begins, each player finds himself in a different part of an enormous maze. Judging by the video and logic, gameplay occurred in two phases. The first was running around collecting items: weapons, armor, spells, and usable items. You can keep four of each. They appear in the upper left-hand corner in four columns, and the player moves a cursor in each column to highlight the active object. Clear statistics indicate what effects the objects have on gameplay. There are common items and unique items, and which ones are close to your starting point is the luck of the draw.

        

The second phase was the actual battle, engaged when any two players first encountered each other, although with more than two players, it was possible for some to form temporary alliances. 

         

Wandering the maze.

      

There are dozens of objects with as many effects. Players can raise and lower attributes, turn invisible, paralyze their opponents, disguise themselves as skeletons, levitate over walls, teleport, attempt to trap their opponents in areas with "stalkers" (the dungeon's only monsters, which players cannot directly engage or kill), turn themselves into stalkers, slow opponents, negate magic, and do a bunch of other things to gain a tactical advantage.

    

There's no "character development," which wouldn't make sense in a game that only lasts half an hour at best. There is technically a single-player mode, which sets you up with an opponent named "Bill the Pincushion" who cannot move, does not attack, and cannot be defeated. The only purpose of the mode seems to be to introduce players to the controls and to let them try out different items on the hapless Bill. 

     

I'm repeatedly stabbing Bill with my dagger here, but it does no damage.

       

In an October 1992 Computer Gaming World review, William C. Fisher lamented that Bill didn't have some rudimentary AI, which would have allowed lonely Mac owners to enjoy the game. (He also whines about the lack of mouse support but otherwise calls it "an engaging and playable game.") I agree. It looks fun, with evocative graphics, lively sound effects, and boisterous gameplay, and I can see how it put Bungie on the map. It feels like a blend of Gauntlet, Sword of Fargoal, and early Stuart Smith games like Fracas or Ali Baba.

   

Four years later, Paranoid Productions licensed Minotaur's code from Bungie to create Odyssey: The Legend of Nemesis (1996), which is a proper RPG, so we'll see something like these screens again.