MAZE CRAZE - Volume II
From 1983 to 1986 a friend and I made a series of maze books based on games or movies that caught our fancy at the time.
Book Number 1 - Republished Oct. 28, 2016
1983, ladies and gentlemen!
My friend from elementary school and myself would get together for sleepovers regularly and run through each other's mazes, testing for solvability and clarity. The best outcome was when you could just hand your friend the completed maze and it could be enjoyed without further explanation.
MAZES:
- Centipede This simple maze's movement mimics the frantic back and forth dashing of the player in the actual game.
- Star Wars - Exhaust Port Not really a maze, this blind multiple choice "puzzle" was inspired by the most stressful single moment for me in the 1983 arcade game.
- Time Pilot This tribute to the 1982 button-masher Time Pilot meandered from the source material by featuring impassable clouds and the goal of fetching the time tape to fix the ripped time barrier (how convenient!).
- Donkey Kong Jr. Volume II started out with a lot of sequels, and this maze is no exception. This maze stayed a little too close to its source material.
- Tomb of the Pharoah One of my few originally-themed mazes, this maze relies on the deception of shaded "illusory" items to present both false leads and escapes. In my mind's eye, it plays out like a side-scrolling platform game.
- The Empire Strikes Back This is the first "multi-maze" I developed, which basically includes many different styles of mazes linked in a path together. At the end, you have to pick which platform is Cloud City, for some reason.
- Ms. Pac-Man This very-cleared-laid-out-with-a-ruler maze strays pretty far from its source material, but what the hey.
- Defender Imagine a side-scrolling prelude to the arcade game, wherein the pilot must race through a compound to his craft, and you have the thrust of this maze. This was really more of a sidescroller in search of an identity.
- Tron 2 Tron, it appears, can also be translated to a side-scrolling "maze" in this sequel (Tron 1 was part of Volume 1). The different zone defenses work much like rock, paper, scissors.
Making Mazes at Childhood's End
You'll hopefully get a look at some of the worthy, surviving remnants of Volume 1 of Maze Craze at some point. My friend and I would "test run" our mazes on each other--build them throughout the week and then referree for each other's attempts to solve them on the weekend.
Text Link to PDF Version
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