Maze Books Made by Dad When He Was a Kid:

MAZE CRAZE - Volume II - Republished Sept. 28, 2022

This maze book features a return to single-page-per-maze form with some of the more obscure 80's arcade games from your local bowling alley or mall arcade, including Guzzler, Marvin's Maze, and Firefox.

Maze Craze #207

Book Number 7

Maze Craze - Firefox

Frankly I can't help but marvel at the dedicated productivity of the young 1986 version of myself when it came to cranking out these maze books. My friend Johnathan and I got into an extended back-and-forth with these books, we became prolific.

It remains a forever sad development that his series of maze books were lost over the years. Somewhere out in the cosmos there is a twin series of maze books with just as much childhood craft and care dedicated to their creation, if not their eventual curation. My hoarder tendencies may have allowed me to retain and eventually present these, but believe me I have paid for it in back pain every time I have moved over the years! ;)

This book is a return to original "classic" Maze Craze form, with one maze per page, per title. Almost every maze here is based on a classic or obscure 1980's arcade video game, with one notable exception: the Raiders of the Lost Ark maze would have only had the Atari 2600 game to serve as an inspration for a maze as there was no arcade game released for Raiders of the Lost Ark. This maze is, instead, inspired by the film itself.

MAZES:

Maze Craze - Baby Pac Man's Adventure
  • Marvin's Maze
  • This 1983 maze game from SNK had dot-eating, lasers, and moveable platforms! Very simple maze out of all that, surprisingly.
  • Guzzler
  • Another 1983 relase, this time from a company called Centuri releasing this Japanese title in NA, Guzzler was a maze game involving sucking up puddles of water to put out fire monsters.
  • Burgertime Screen #2
  • Burgertime was a 1982 arcade release from Bally Midway Mfg Co. and I was never good enough at it to make it to screen #2. Thus, this maze is fun yet wildly inaccurate. Baby Pac-Man Arcade Cabinet
  • Baby Pac-Man's Adventure
  • This 1982 release from Bally Midway was a combination video game and pinball game. I didn't really play with that at all in the maze I made here, having long-since settled on circular mazes as my theme for Pac-Man games.
  • Crossbow
  • Another 1983 number, Crossbow was an early arcade light-run shooter released by Exidy, and was the first video game to feature digitized voice and sound effects.
  • Firefox
  • Firefox was a 1984 Atari laserdisc-based coin-op arcade game based on the 1982 Clint Eastwood film of the same name, wherein his character steals and pilots an experimental Russian stealth jet.
  • Raiders of the Lost Ark
  • The original 1981 Indiana Jones action-adventure film from Steven Spielberg and George Lucas only received one direct video game adaptation, released for the Atari 2600 in November 1982. This maze is not based on the game, but the original film. I wasn't satifisfied with Atari 2600 graphic quality for my mazes anymore.
  • Berzerk
  • I can't believe it took me until book number seven to make a maze for this original shooter maze game released in 1980 from Stern Electronics. I played the surprisingly-faithful Atari 2600 port extensively.
Guzzler Arcade Cabinet

Guzzler?!? Really?

Arcade game selection in the area I grew up in Denver, Colorado was sometimes kind of weird and spotty, as I imagine it could be regionally everywhere around the U.S. Arcades themselves would pop up in the local mall, open for years in the same location in the beginning of the arcade boom, but then constantly moving and changing names and selection of games as the volatility of the industry expressed itself. Yet on the other hand, bowling alleys, bars, and convenience stores would sometimes install an array of strange, obscure arcade games that would just... remain for a long time. This allowed me to get to know games very well that other kids of my age didn't know or encounter at all.

Maze Craze #207 PDF

Text Link to PDF Version