Wayout

There were many pseudo-3D maze games at the time (such as 3D Monster Maze, Phantom Slayer, and 3-Demon), but they used a fixed perspective and limited the player to four orientations. Capture the Flag was published as a follow-up in 1983. It allows two players to compete at once with a split-screen view and adds dynamic music.

• Title — Wayout • Developer — Sirius Software • Publisher — Sirius Software • Designer — Paul Allen Edelstein • Released — 1982: Apple II, Atari 8-bit 1983: C64 • Genre — Maze • Modes — Single-player • Platforms — Atari 8-bit, Apple II, Commodore 64

• Illustration — The view from inside the maze The game can be played with either a joystick, paddles or the keyboard, allowing the player to move forward and turn left or right (but not backwards). The player is trapped inside one of 26 mazes and must find the exit with the use of a compass and a map-making kit. The game automatically maps the areas that the player explores and records how many movement units the player uses up, saving the best scores to the game disk. There is also a computer controlled opponent called the Cleptangle who appears as a spinning rectangular form which moves around the maze and will render the player's compass and mapmaker useless by stealing them if it comes into contact with the player. In addition, there is a wind within each maze, which blows in a constant direction, and is visualized by the presence of fireflies (represented by single pixels, moving through the maze). The wind can sometimes be too strong for the player to push against, but it can also help the player locate the exit of the maze. In the lower portion of the screen is a top-down, 2D view, of the maze the player inhabits and draws itself as the player moves around, in a very similar way to the automap feature which became prevalent in many later first-person shooters such as Doom.