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1. Hamster maze with multiple ways out software#
2. Hamster maze with multiple ways out code#
3. Hamster maze with multiple ways out trial#

It seems straightforward, but the thing is, no-one can work out how the table was made.Īycock and Copplestone have tried retro-engineering the table. Depending on the values of the five-square tile, the table tells the game to deposit either wall, no wall or a random choice between the two. The fundamental logic that determines the next square is locked in a table of possible values written into the game’s code. This tile determines the nature of the next square in each row. It uses a five-square tile that looks a little like a Tetris piece. The game’s algorithm decides this automatically by analysing a section of the maze. Each square should therefore be “wall” or “no wall” – “1” or “0” in computer bits. The game needs to decide, as it draws each new square of the maze, whether it should draw a wall or a space for the game characters to move around in. It turned out that the maze is generated in a sequence. “As I dug into this maze algorithm, it became clear that this was something that seemed to be fairly unique to this maze game.” “It was a very deep rabbit hole,” he recalls. He thought there was a good chance he’d find some clever process at work in the depths of Entombed.

In many cases, mazes were generated “procedurally” – in other words, the game created them randomly on the fly, so players never actually traversed the same maze twice.īut how do you do get a computer program to avoid churning out a useless maze with too many walls, or an otherwise impenetrable floorplan?Īycock understood the trickiness of the problem. ( Read more about the mind of a maze-builder.)Īlthough the blocky, two dimensional mazes from entombed might look simple by the standards of today’s computer graphics, in 1982 you couldn’t just design a set of mazes, store them in the game and later display them on-screen – there wasn’t enough memory on the game cartridges for something like that. 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.

Hamster maze with multiple ways out 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.

Hamster maze with multiple ways out 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.

A downward-scrolling, two-dimensional maze that players had to navigate expertly in order to evade the “clammy, deadly grip” of their zombie foes.

Hamster maze with multiple ways out trial#

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.