Thursday, September 11, 2014

Shades of Resonance: Fond Reminiscence - Memory Log #1

Maze Craze: A Game of Cops 'n Robbers

Now, I'm able to remember those that comprised the first batch of video games I ever played (they were part of a five-game list that included Adventure, Circus Atari, Space Invaders, Asteroids, and the subject of this piece), but I'm not sure, exactly, which of them was the very first game I ever played. That's because I lack fully-formed memories of my first 2600 experiences; all I've retained, instead, are scattered images of a four-year-old me sitting in front of that old TV in my brother's room looking wonderstruck as he observed what was happening on its small screen.

The more I think about it, though, the more I'm convinced that it was the one whose name and concept would have appealed most to my hyperactive brain: Maze Craze: A Game of Cops 'n Robbers. After all: The child version of me enjoyed partaking in any activity that invited him to run about, in every which direction, like a diseased monkey boy, so a game that combined the practices of scurrying through mazes and feverishly fleeing from scary authority figures was right up his alley!

So, really, not much has changed in 35 years.


Maze Craze also appealed to me because it, like all of my 2600 favorites, had an easy-to-understand objective: win by reaching the maze's exit on the screen's right side. And winning at Maze Craze was easy for me because I played it alone and did so only on the game's default mode, in which there were no sub-goals. I played it this way not because I was the type who sought to earn victory in the cheapest and easiest way possible, no, but because I was, like, really dumb. I simply never realized that Maze Craze was a multiplayer-focused game and that it had additional modes. No, you see--that would have required that I made an effort to toggle any of the console's switches or even notice that they were there.

I want to say that I might have realized as much had my brother, James, not thrown away the game's manual (which was the first thing he'd do whenever he unboxed a new game), but, really, I probably wouldn't have read it anyway. After all: I had more important things to do, like running around in circles while doing incomprehensible chants and shoving my brother's Star Wars figures into the ice slot of our Snoopy Sno-Cone Machine.

Eventually I figured out that Maze Craze was a multiplayer-focused game and even played a few rounds with my brother or some other family member (I'm not certain of which), and thus I discovered that it was even more fun than I originally thought! Though, I wouldn't come to learn of just how great a multiplayer game it was until years later--sometime during the mid-80s--when I began inviting my friends to join me in my nostalgia-driven 2600 binges; that's when we rediscovered Maze Craze and did what I failed to do years earlier: explore its additional modes.


By toggling the 2600's "Game Select" switch, we discovered that Maze Craze contained dozens of modes, each of which was unique in some way. And all of the non-default modes had interesting sub-goals that you had to meet before you could escape the maze. In any such mode, you'd have to, say, make contact with the three colored blocks that were also roaming the maze; or completely avoid colored blocks, making contact with which would permanently freeze your character or temporarily immobilize your character, who would then be forced to slowly accelerate back to normal movement-speed. In other modes, your characters would move at super-fast or super-slow speeds. And there were also those in which you had to find your way to exits by running through mazes whose displays were partially or largely obscured along the horizontal axis.

And we were fans of all of them. We loved each mode and the ways in which they allowed us to compete with each other; our every match was an ideal combination of tense, frantic and fun--great fun, I'd say. We couldn't get enough of Maze Craze--of the reliably fun entertainment it provided us. That's why it became one of our go-to games and particularly the capper to any 2600 binge. And it remained as such until the very end.


And it's due in large part to Maze Craze that those once-every-six-months "nostalgia-driven" binges instead became weekly events. Suddenly, almost a half-decade later, the 2600 was as relevant as ever to our group.

Atari was back, baby! Well, in our lives, at least.

Though, my brother's room was no longer the center of the action, which it had been since 1980. By then, the house had seen some interior changes, and James' room had since been converted into a small, crowded den. So instead, we decided to hook the 2600 up to the TV in my parents' spacier bedroom, which is where our group's weekly binge-parties were now being held--for however long that era lasted (it felt like several years, though in actuality it was probably one-two). We'd gather there at around 5:00 .p.m., at a time of day when sunlight would refract through the curtains and provide the room a nostalgia-inducing pale-yellow texture and therein the perfect atmosphere in which to enjoy old 2600 games, and play until nighttime arrived. And we'd have great fun each time.

(We were never sure, though, of the characters' identities. "Are we controlling the cops or the robbers?" we'd wonder. "And do the squares represent them or their cars?" Call it one of life's great mysteries.)

That a game from the 1970s could provide us so much entertainment proved that fun experiences were completely independent of technical specifications--that even the oldest games could stand among the best you'd ever played. Maze Craze was exhibit A. It did what our modern favorites--all of the Commodore 64 and NES games we so cherished--were able to do: bring us together and provide us hours of laughter and fun; for that reason, it fit in perfectly with their group. And for the longest time, Maze Craze was just as important to us as Balloon Fight, Ice Climber, Bruce Lee, Cliff Hanger, and even those we'd frequently play on 16-bit consoles.

Maze Craze's was an important message--one that I'd forever feel inspired to repeat: "Truly great games transcend their technology."

That's what Maze Craze was able to do.


Maze Craze was packed with interesting modes, it was very accessible, and it was utterly replayable. It was, quite simply, the quintessential Atari 2600 game. It personified what the console was all about: wonderfully simple fun. And because it was able to provide us such, my friends and I continued to play it until as late as the mid-90s. That's how much it appealed to us.

What it did, also, was help the 2600 to again rise to prominence and thus enjoy a resurgence that saw it work its way into our gaming culture, of which it would be an important part for another decade.

And that's all because of games Maze Craze, which showed us that greatness is measured in the quality of the experience and not in CPU speeds, bits of RAM, and graphical power.

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