Maze Games to Platformers (again?) (Racing Games pt. 5)

Taxonomy of Virtual Spaces

This is a continuing history of the evolution of early car racing games as analyzed according to each game's visuo-spatial configuration. Be sure to read part 1 and part 2 and part 3 and part 4 before continuing.

This post covers the earliest racing games and shows how they may connect to the genre of maze games.

Head-Onkyo Alien

Head-On (SEGA/Gremlin, 1979)

I previously wrote that SEGA's hit racing/maze game was likely influenced by early single-screen race games like Gran Trak 10 (Atari, 1974) and was likely an influence on Pac-Man (NAMCO, 1980).

Heiankyo Alien (Denki Onkyō Corporation, 1980)

Another important maze video game from that year was Heiankyo Alien (1979), which started out as an Apple II game created by a group of students at Tokyo University. Heiankyo Alien was designed over "two days" and inspired by a go game board though Head-On could have possibly been an influence if it was released early enough in the year. It may have simply been a case of simultaneous invention, where different developers were unaware of each other when they both created narrow passageway maze games.

Heiankyo Alien is no dot-eater. The human player character must dig pit traps in the maze to capture roving alien monsters. Once caught in a pit (seemingly falling into a space "under" the screen), the player must bury the alien before it can escape from the trap. Once all aliens are trapped, a new wave of aliens starts wandering the streets.

What is certain is that Denki Onkyō Corporation had developed a Head-On clone (unclear if it was licensed from SEGA or not) and reused the same arcade PCB to port Heiankyo Alien! When SEGA licensed Heiankyo Alien, it was also manufactured with Head-On boards (and renamed the game as Digger (1980) for the US market). Even if one game was not inspired by the other, there is a strong technological tie between the two games. The upgrade from Apple II prototype to Head-On PCB moved the game from a simple discrete spatial model to a continuous spatial model.

Space Panic (Universal Co. Ltd., 1980)

As I extensively posted about previously, there is strong evidence that Heiankyo Alien became a critical inspiration for Space Panic (Universal Co. Ltd., 1980), what is often considered the first "platformer game." The Space Panic gameplay turns the earlier game on its side, almost literally. 4-way movement is almost identical, with the characters locked to moving vertically on ladders and horizontally by walking on platforms (no jumping). The player digs holes to trap the aliens, knocking them through the floor when buried, and squashing any other alien caught underneath. The player may also drop through a hole for a quick trip to the floor below.

All of this gameplay is only possible with the addition of gravity. Which leads me to my theory...

Platformers are Maze Games with Gravity

At least, this holds true for many platformers that don't include jumping. These are what I sometimes call "ladder" platformers, where jumping is not a major method of navigation (at least, not vertically). I would make the argument that Donkey Kong counts as a ladder platformer but Donkey Kong Jr. does not. Maze games typically lock the player into orthogonal movement along proscribed paths. Gravity gives objects a different way to move toward the bottom of the screen and adds a new wrinkle for navigation.

Example figure from Atari Graphics and Arcade Game Design (Jeffrey Stanton and Dan Pinal, 1984, Arrays Inc., pg. 387)

This theory is not entirely new. Many game writers in the 1980s classified these platformers as maze games before the new genre became prevalent, as the examples below show.

"While most people do not think of games like Donkey Kong and Apple Panic as maze games, they too require a set of movement rules to keep the player confined to floors and ladders" (Jeffrey Stanton and Dan Pinal, Atari Graphics and Arcade Game Design, Arrays Inc., 1984, pg. 387) (see figure above).

"Donkey Kong [is] a game that looks a little like a race game with intelligent obstacles... Apple Panic... is like a maze game in some ways and like a combat game in others" (Chris Crawford, The Art of Computer Game Design, Osborne/McGraw Hill, 1984, pp. 29-30).

Crawford's comparison of Donkey Kong to a "race game" is because the goal of most levels is to move from starting point to the finish line as quickly as possible. The rivet stage is the only one that has a set of objectives to complete (remove all 8 rivets). Also note that Apple Panic (Broderbund, 1981) was an unlicensed port of Space Panic for Apple II and was far more prevalent example in the USA than the original arcade game.

Donkey Kong is "more like being in a cartoon than any other maze game" (Walter Lowe, Jr., Playboy's Guide to Rating the Video Games, PBJ Books, 1982, pg. 257).

Donkey Kong and Popeye are games where "the player element on the screen can be moved to different parts of the screen, which is basically a maze. The concept of each of these games is different; most are obstacle courses with some maze-like features" (Paul Kordestani, Gamester's Guide to Arcade Video Games, Tab Books, 1983, pg. 15). "Burger Time is a maze game..." (pg. 297).

Platformer games (side elevation orthographic, gravity down) can thus be seen as an augmentation or evolution of the visuo-spatial configuration of most maze games (plan orthographic, no gravity).