Maze game

Maze game is a video game genre. These games involve a player navigating a maze. Some of these games, also called maze chase games, involve navigating a maze while under pursuit from other characters moving through the same maze. While the term first appeared in 1980, some of the earliest video games involved navigating a maze, such as Mouse in the Maze created in the 1950s. While some writers such as Mark J. Wolf described games like Pac-Man (1980) as combining maze games with "collecting" and "escaping" gameplay styles, Allison Gizzard suggested Wolf's definition made the maze its own non-entity as a genre and more of an element of other gameplay styles.

In the 1970s, early commercial maze games such as Gotcha (1973) by Atari were released to arcades and home consoles. Towards the late 1970s, maze games began to have broader goals. Games such as Slot Racers (1978), Head On (1979) and Heiankyo Alien (1979) included gameplay beyond basic maze navigation such as collecting items and avoiding other maze dwellers.

Namco's Pac-Man (1980) was described by Steven Malliet and Gust De Meyere in Handbook of Computer Game Studies (2005) as "the perfection" of the maze game genre. In the early 1980s, various sequels to Pac-Man, games that expanded upon its gameplay, and various video game clones of the original game were released. While some Pac-Man games delved into other genres such as the platformer Pac-Land (1984), mazes games began to appear less frequently as elements such as 3D environments and side-scrolling became more prominent in video games. Some later releases would still retain the core gameplay of the genre, such as the various Pac-Man sequels including Pac-Mania (1987) and (2007).