The Evolution Of: 3D Monster Maze
Malcolm Evans is here to guide you through a maze of technical prowess
“The easiest thing to do was have a smallish monster that got bigger as it walked towards you. But not randomly, he would actually go for you!”
MALCOLM EVANS
Programming is a young man’s game. At least that was what thirty‑something microprocessor scientist Malcolm Evans was advised when he looked into changing disciplines. Malcolm chose to ignore this guidance, however, and in 1981 – after unwrapping a birthday present from his wife – he took matters into his own hands, as the pioneering developer explains. “I was in the aerospace industry doing hardware, and I was keen to get into doing software, but it was difficult,” Malcolm sighs. “So what happened was that my wife bought me a ZX81, and I thought: ‘Now what the hell can I do with this?’ So I wrote an algorithm that created a random maze. I did that in 2D, but then I wondered: ‘What would it look like if you walked around it?’”
Malcolm’s solution for rendering first‑person perspective tours exploited the ZX81’S ability to rapidly switch between full‑screen graphics. He used these as frames of animation depicting 3D sections of his maze, which subsequently became home to a monster. “You could build up frames and then switch them, so I was doing that,” Malcolm notes, “and then I was talking to a friend who said: ‘Why don’t you put something into the maze and make it a game?’ So I thought: ‘How do I get a monster in there, and how on Earth do I animate it?’ I decided that the easiest thing to do was have a smallish monster that got bigger as it walked towards you. But not randomly, he would actually go for you!”
Having given Rex – his monster – homing instincts, Malcolm evened the odds with a chilling text-message system to warn players of the T-rex’s proximity to them. “I didn’t think about using visual indicators to show how close the dinosaur was,” Malcolm reasons, “because ideally I wanted sounds in there, but the sound on the ZX81 was just clicks and bangs, so I thought about just telling you where Rex was. You wouldn’t necessarily see him coming at you, but you always turned and ran! It was just to build up the anxiety, and you didn’t necessarily have to see him to do that.”
By way of rewarding players who held their nerve, Malcolm devised a scoring system with points being awarded for each step taken before becoming Rex’s lunch. “I suppose the thing was that each maze was completely different – so where you started, and where the exit was,” Malcolm ponders. “Obviously, some would have been easier than others, but each one was slightly more difficult, and I just wanted somehow to
give players a sense of achievement, even if they were killed off after 20 steps!”
Having given prospective players of his debut title suitable incentive, Malcolm named his labyrinthine horror game 3D Monster Maze, and on its release it devoured the competition. “It was only after I produced it that I started looking at what else was available,” Malcolm admits. “It was then that I discovered that: ‘Oh. They’re all in 2D!’ So it was a surprise to me that 3D Monster Maze sold. The other thing that happened was that as it started to take off I was made redundant. The company I was working for – Sperry Gyroscope in Bristol – closed down. So I ended up unemployed at just the right time.”
Viewing redundancy as an opportunity, Malcolm convinced Whsmith to buy 10,000 copies of 3D Monster Maze upfront, after which he devised a WWI follow-up. “My first thought was: ‘Wouldn’t it be great to do a First World War dogfight!’”
Malcolm enthuses. “But it would have ended up being quite slow, and you wouldn’t recognise what the aircraft were until they were virtually on top of you, so you couldn’t put biplanes in there! One thing I wish I had realised was that the ZX81 character set could have been changed, so increasing the apparent graphics resolution. Then zeppelins could have gracefully slid across the screen with detailed biplanes weaving around in protective roles.”
But with his focus on low-res visuals, Malcolm reimagined his WWI dogfight as an invasion of saucer-shaped UFOS that could easily be identified from a distance. “The first thing I did was plot lines on the ground, so that you would get a feeling of height and speed,” Malcolm recalls. “Then I simplified the biplanes down to UFOS, which were round, and therefore you recognised that they were UFOS. But then I realised that they were coming towards you and flying off the edge of the screen pretty quickly! It was then that I extended the size of the screen by putting radar on it, so that you could see that off to one side or the other there was a UFO coming.”
The radar in Malcolm’s shooter was far from traditional, however, which the developer puts down to his game’s narrative and its lack of screen
space. “Well I was assuming that these UFOS would be attacking in the future, and not in the present day!” Malcolm laughs. “It was also the fact that the graphic for the radar couldn’t be very big, and yet you still had to get all of the information from it that you needed. So I settled on the radar and proximity meters I had because they seemed to be sufficient.”
As well as incorporating an atypical radar, Malcolm further increased the difficulty of his second game – now named 3D Defender – by deducting points for each UFO that wasn’t shot down. “While I was testing it, putting in some incentive to do something just came in automatically,” Malcolm reflects. “I wanted to build up the anxiety all of the time, just like I did in 3D Monster Maze. I was more interested in building up the anxiety than some other aspects, perhaps. So you couldn’t just sit there in 3D Defender and have a cup of tea!”
Like 3D Monster Maze before it, 3D Defender turned heads on its release, then just months later, Malcolm ordered a ZX Spectrum, and after developing a top-down Spectrum Monster Maze he rendered a first-person perspective tunnel on the system. “I thought I’d do something like any dinosaurs down there. Of course, what you do find at the end of a tunnel is an underground train coming towards you! I think there was just one safe position between it and the wall, and you would see all of the people in it zooming past.”
In addition to tapping into animal-based phobias, Malcolm also made collisions with the tunnel walls of his latest project deadly, just to further increase the anxiety of those playing it.
“You had to really concentrate all of the time, and if you were concentrating on trying to shoot things then you would go into the wall,” Malcolm observes. “So it would entice you to be thinking about two things at the same time, because suddenly the tunnel would zoom left or right, or up or down. It was just to raise the player’s anxiety; I would always do that with my fast-moving games.”
One final possibility for high anxiety was overlooked by Malcolm as he finalised his tunnel-set shooter, in that 3D Tunnel – as it was now called – didn’t have junctions, although he feels that he could have made them work. “I probably would have tried to get it so that you would see the tunnel dividing into two, and then you would go down one or the other,” Malcolm
“By changing the colours, I could create movement of the tunnel. I thought you lost all perspective of sitting on a chair”
speculates. “But you wouldn’t have known what was down each one, so then there could have been a sign coming towards you saying: ‘Toads this way, bats that way!’”
Of course, 3D Tunnel didn’t need junctions, and its impressive visuals and breakneck speed ensured brisk sales when it came out, but rather than taking a well-earned break, Malcolm sought out inspiration for his next project. “I went around to a friend of mine who had Snake on the BBC, and I thought: ‘I wonder what it would be like in 3D?’” Malcolm muses. “Then I realised I could do what I did in 3D Tunnel, and just change the colours to do the whole thing. So you had various colours on each side of the trails, and each trail had three different colours, and as it was all done on colours I could move it as fast as I wanted.”
But rather than locking his latest game’s play area to the horizontal plane – like 3D Monster
Maze, Malcolm set its vibrant trails in a perpetual forward motion with options to veer left, right, up and down. “The map went to infinity in all directions,” Malcolm says of his Snake-inspired title, “but if you went out one side you appeared at the other, and if you kept going you would run into yourself. You could watch as a trail was being created in front of you or to one side, and as things got more and more tight you could end up flying down a tunnel. If you could see a gap, and if you timed it right, you could zoom off, although the trails would often increase until you got stuck.”
Given that Malcolm’s first-person perspective Snake got harder as time went on, you might imagine that he would reward players in line with its increasing challenge, but he opted to turn this thinking on its head. “At the beginning, there was nothing in there, so it was a lot easier, and by the time things got tough you had a high score,” Malcolm points out, “so I then made it more and more difficult to get points. Then with later phases you started with more trails, and therefore everything built up far quicker, but you had to carry on getting points, and that would get more and more difficult every phase.”
In light of the difficulty of Malcolm’s 3D Snake adaptation – named Knot In 3D – a radar like 3D Defender’s could have been added to the game, although its designer feels that it wouldn’t have helped. “The way I wanted Knot In 3D to go, I didn’t think you would be able to take your eyes of it,” Malcolm argues. “Even with a copilot saying: ‘Go left!’ or ‘Go right!’ you would have passed the point where you were supposed to turn before you had responded. Also, a radar would have been complicated, and so quite confusing to use.”
Magazine reviewers loved Knot In 3D when they got their hands on it, but by this point Malcolm had moved on to adapting his ZX81 debut for the Spectrum as Corridors Of Genon, with small creatures called Boguls in place of Rex. “Corridors Of Genon was me trying to make a Spectrum 3D Monster Maze,” Malcolm acknowledges, “and the size of the Bogul was the biggest you could get. So what I had to do was have some way of them getting you, even though they might be
“The Boguls looked cute because they had a long trumpet-nose, that’s where the gunge came out. That’s all they could do – snort gunge all over you!” MALCOLM EVANS
small. So that’s why I thought of the player character getting ‘gunged’ – or ‘Boguled!’ The Boguls looked cute because they had a long trumpet-nose, but that’s where the gunge came out of. That’s all they could do – snort gunge all over you!”
Corridors Of Genon also differed from 3D Monster Maze in that its maze incorporated security code-protected doors instead of open doorways, which your ESP could open, providing attacks by Boguls didn’t deplete your sixth sense. “Each door was like the board game Mastermind,” Malcolm explains, “and you had the sound of the Bogul coming at you, so you knew if he was at the other side of the door. If you didn’t enter the code in a certain time you had to run off somewhere, and you also had
the possibility that the Bogul could be in your corridor, so you had to keep worrying about that as well.”
By retaining 3D
Monster Maze’s key mechanic of being stalked by an unseen predator, Corridors Of Genon replicated its inspiration’s edgy atmosphere, although unlike its predecessor it stopped short of rewarding each step taken before death. “I think I probably thought that the anxiety was there already,” Malcolm contemplates, “and you would only be able to look at a score when you stopped, because if you took your eye off the game then anything could happen in that time. Also, your best time was something to beat instead of a score.”
But in keeping with Malcolm’s T-rex-themed debut, Corridors Of Genon had a twist; once you escaped its corridors the Boguls respawned and you were sent back in. “I don’t know if I was maybe doing something like in 3D Monster Maze, where if you got killed you got a one in two chance of coming out of that,” Malcolm wonders. “If so, the end of Corridors Of Genon might have been me having another laugh at the player’s expense!”
Although his next project – Trashman – delivered more laughs, Corridors Of Genon was Malcolm’s final first-person perspective game. Decades later, Malcolm is pleased that his 3D games are still popular and appreciated. “Everything after Corridors Of Genon was up against the limits of the Spectrum – that’s why I changed perspectives,” Malcolm says. “I could still make the games 3D-ish, but they weren’t in first-person perspective, I think in my mind I’d exhausted the 3D capability of the Spectrum. So I’m just astounded that people still enjoy playing my 3D games, but I’m proud of that.”