The Fourth Maze.

One day while searching my garage for a few tools to fix my old broken down car I came across something that jogged my memory a bit. An old ATARI 2600 cartridge that I had long since forgotten in my old age. It brought back a lot of memories, you see dear reader back in the 70s while I was attending college and looking for part time jobs to fill my stomach with beer and pizza I was given the rare opportunity to work as an intern for Atari.

It wasn’t a glamorous job, id be sent to fetch coffee for the bosses in the middle of big corporate meetings and sent off to print papers for other people who worked in the offices but at the time it was a means to keep my stomach full. I had a curiosity for computers and got to see a few of the cool things like blueprints of something they called project “2600” a few of the bosses there told me it would revolutionize the home video game market. What was more interesting where the people who developed games for the machine, corporate would hold competitions between development teams to see who could come up with the most creative games. I would often be sent to get coffee for the people in the meeting rooms and was able to overhear some of the ideas being thrown around.

One of the members of the development team, his name was chase, was a bit strange he didn’t like working with the other members of the group and preferred to be alone in his cubical. One day while I was on a break eating lunch in the company’s cafeteria he came up to me and sat down, for some reason I guessed he liked me. He was usually really quiet but he kept talking my ear off about a project he had been working on for the 2600 that he claimed would change the gaming world forever. Chase was developing the first horror game for the system. I know that sounds normal from today’s standards but keep in mind that back then a horror game for a family friendly system was considered taboo the company wanted to make money not scare there customer away. I heard about it for months and months Chase wouldn’t shut up about it. Until one day he came up to me in the cafeteria and shoved a blank cartridge in my face and begged me to play it and tell him what I thought. By that time the company had already made a prototype of the Atari 2600 system and had it sitting in a room where the bosses usually had their meetings. So one night after I had finished my duties as an intern for the day I went into the office and popped the game into the system to see what Chase had been all worked up about.

The screen flickered for a minute and then I could clearly see the title screen of the game. although it had no name there was a “Start Game” option. So I clicked the red button on the Atari controller and was greeted with another blank dark screen, a few moments had passed and then I single red dot appeared in the center of an overwhelming black background. I moved the joystick up and the red dot started moving, one thing I noticed was that when I moved the red dot a smear of red pixels would show up directly behind it. I continued moving up in the black background while red pixels followed me around the screen and then the little dot suddenly came to a stop, there was a *beep* sound that came after it. I tried moving the joystick to the left and the dot kept going until it suddenly came to a stop again and I heard another *beep* noise come out of the speaker on the television. Curious I moved my joystick directing the red dot all around the screen, at random points the dot would stop and I’d hear the same sound again. I hadn’t noticed until I took a step back from the television but the smear of red pixels behind the red dot slowly began forming into something as I kept playing. Then it hit me, the little red dot I was controlling was in an invisible maze and each time I hit a wall I would hear a beeping sound, the pixels that showed behind the red dot would make out the walls I was supposed to avoid. I thought this was very unique and continued to fill the screen until every wall had been uncovered. At this point a larger square had appeared on the upper right hand of the screen and some text above read “door” I maneuvered the red dot through the maze it had created and into the larger square that was supposed to be a door. My dot was at the bottom of the screen again, greeted by another black background. There was a text in the middle of the screen that read “try not to hit walls” and three red dots appeared on the top left of my screen, these must have been lives my character had. It took me a few attempts but after my twelfth screen of “Game Over” I had finally managed to complete the second maze and another door appeared, the same thing happened on the next level only I was given two lives instead of three. It took me even more time to complete that maze and then go through the next door where I was met yet again with a blank black background and only one life on the left part of the screen. It took me some time but I realized this game was meant to help build the players memory every time they played the game. After you died you would be sent back to the very beginning and have to do the puzzles all over again and each time you entered a new room you where given fewer and fewer lives making the process of beating the game longer and longer and longer each time you played. Since you only had a single life once you reached what I had guessed was the last room of the game this made it increasingly hard to beat. I tried time and time again tirelessly trying to get the maze drawn out so I could advance through the door. I kept at it until looking up at the clock on the wall and realizing it was past midnight, I had school in the morning so I turned off the 2600 prototype and pulled out the blank cartridge that Chance had given me, put it in my pocket and drove back to my dorm to get some shut eye.

Though I tried hard to shut my eyelids and get some needed sleep I just couldn’t, I ended up just looking at the ceiling the whole night thinking about how I would beat the fourth maze in the game. I had played through the previous levels so much that id memorized the other mazes by heart but for some reason I just couldn’t figure out the last maze. I obsessed over it the whole night and only managed to get two or three hours of actual sleep before my alarm clock blared and I had to go to my morning classes. I thought about the game while I was in class and as soon as my last class of the day was complete I drove back down to the offices and found myself back in the same room with the cartridge inserted into the 2600 again. I blazed through the first three levels of the game and got back to where I had been stuck. This habit of coming back to the offices after school or work went on for weeks. I’d play for four hours straight trying to figure out where the maze ended and couldn’t do it. I was so invested in the game that I sweat profusely every time I got to the fourth maze. I was so hell bent on beating the maze and so angry that I couldn’t figure it out that I threw the controller at the television screen, switched off the 2600 and ripped the cartridge out of the system and furiously walked to Chances cubical. I found him there eating pasta out of a plastic container and working on some sort of program and slammed the cartridge in front of him and saying “what the hell man” in I bitter tone. Chance had a look of surprise on his face staring back at me in confusion and then checking the cartridge I had slammed down to see if it had any damage. When he was finished examining the cartridge he looked back up at me and asked what was wrong.

I explained that I had been trying to get past the fourth maze of the game for the past couple of weeks and just couldn’t figure it out. When I told him this he just chuckled and said “so it works”. He had a smug grin on his face which seemed odd since he always seemed to be more of a serious guy. I told him I was sorry that I had lost my temper and asked if I could barrow the game a little longer and figure out the puzzle. He gladly handed me the cartridge and said “don’t worry you’ll figure it out, you just need to think a little harder”. And with that I left his cubical and decided to call it a day and headed back to my dorm at the university. A couple of days had passed before I started playing the game again, the obsession came back stronger than before and I found myself spending hours at a time trying to figure out the maze. I’d skip school on occasion and spend entire nights into the early morning trying to figure out the maze. Yet I still couldn’t seem to wrap my head around how the puzzle worked. I would go into Chances cubical and ask him for hints but all he ever said was “you just need to think a little harder, think outside the box”. This only made me more frustrated as the months passed and I tried to complete the last maze. One day I walked back into Chances cubical only to find that he and all of his things had suddenly disappeared without a trace, his computer, and all of his other office supplies had just up and left leaving a blank desk. When I tried to see if he was in the cafeteria he was nowhere to be found and the next day when I came into work and popped my head into his cubical somebody else had taken his place. This was sort of off putting and left me feeling a bit worried. I thought me and chase where close enough that if he’d gotten the axe or moved somewhere else he’d at least say goodbye and thank me for testing his game.

I went up into my one of my supervisors offices and asked what had happened to Chance, I told my boss that we where good friends and he hadn’t even bothered to tell me goodbye. My boss had a puzzled look on his face and told me that the company had tried calling his house throughout the week but couldn’t get a hold of him; eventually my boss said they had to let him go and find somebody with enough skill to take his place. As mysterious as this was I was still hell bent on beating the game and I kept trying. A few more weeks went by without having any luck and then one night, walking into the conference room where the 2600 was and tired from a long day at school I put the cartridge into the system backwards without realizing it. There was a small screw in the back that held the cartridge together and distinguished the front from the back. When I turned the system on the game started but everything was slightly different, the colors on the start screen where a bright yellow instead of a dark black. I was confused until I looked down and saw that I had put the cartridge in the wrong way. Somehow the game was still working so I pressed the usual start game option and a few seconds later a little red dot appeared on the screen on a bright yellow background instead of a black one. The maze had been outlined in grey pixels so I wouldn’t have to make the maze myself before finding my way through it to get towards the door there also didn’t seem to be any sort of lives on the top left of the screen this time around. As I navigated through the grey lines towards the door the screen started flickering I figured it was just something with the output of the system and continued into the next room. What I found was another completed maze but this time there where smaller groups of text near various points of the grey lines. At first I was confused but then I figured out they where names of various streets near my university. This was really off-putting but I continued to make my way up the “street” until I got to the third screen. The names of the streets continued the same way a map would but the difference between level two and three was that now there were other red dots on the screen near specific streets. I made my way through the third level and found myself at the beginning of the last maze. It had been outlined for me and what I saw shocked me. the red dot on the screen appeared smaller and so did the maze. Compared to the other mazes this one had some incredible detail, the twists and turns where more complicated than previous levels and it finally made sense why I wasn’t able to pass the fourth maze. There were even more red dots in various areas around the screen and twice as many street names as the mazes before it. When I went towards the red dots Id get a beeping sound just like before, the only difference was that this time it would show text above the dot with names like “Sue” and “Anne” or “Bill”. Each red dot had a name associated with it. I was confused as to why this was in the game but I carried on.

I felt a bit of excitement as I made my way towards the doorway of the fourth maze and quickly entered it. This time instead of being met with a bright yellow screen and another completed maze for me to navigate through it was nothing more than a black background with a block of white text that read:

“Congratulations player you Have beaten the game. I’m sorry”. - Game Over

I was left with an empty feeling after finally completing the game and was a bit disappointed but I thought back to the clue Chance had given me before he disappeared he’d told me “think outside the box” and I realized what he meant when id accidently put in the cartridge backwards, the cartridge must have had been double sided in some way which is strange because the cartridge had a set of pin connectors on the front and back put maybe putting them in the opposite way, back to front, made the game read differently when inside the system. This was a unique idea if you really think about it, none of the other cartridges where able to do that. I was also a bit confused about the street names and the red dots having names of their own, where they supposed to be early versions of enemies? And the text at the end of the game was also a bit strange. I didn’t really put much thought into this though and went on with my life eventually forgetting about the game and getting back into my routine of balancing work and school.

About a year into my internship On September of 1977 the Atari was released to the general public and I as well as a few other interns where given a free console with a handful of games including Indy 500 and Blackjack. Which were impressive for the time I had developed a love for videogames…well until one night while attending a bar near my university I saw something disturbing on the television mounted on the wall. The whole bar fell silent as the local news station stated that police had found several bodies near the university area, including a sophomore named Anne Lace and a freshmen named Bill Colinswell. The news also stated that several other people had gone missing in the area but investigators didn’t have a lead on who could be kidnapping or killing the victims.

My heart sank as I remembered the red dots in the game Chance had given me having names like “Anne” and “Bill” and it only got worse the next Monday I came into work at the office, one of the bosses that I had talked to about Chances disappearance pulled me aside during my shift and told me that police had found finger prints near the site where two college students were slaughtered and buried and where snooping around the offices trying to figure out anything they could about Chance to get dirt on him for a trial. He was being held for suspicion. I must have been really stupid not to realize that the “Game” chance had given me was just a big map of the city with red dots indicating where Chance had hidden his victims. When I told this too police and handed them the cartridge Chance had given me before disappearing more and more bodies began piling up and the cartridge itself was enough evidence do put him away for life. And that’s exactly what Chance got when I saw him a couple months later on a campus television. After that I never touched another game again. Chance and his cold smile still haunt me to this day. After looking though the garage for parts to fix my broken down car I went out front to my mail box and had gotten a letter buried in bills and various other things titled “To whom it may concern read immediately” it didn’t say who it was from only an address from the state prison but the hair on the back of my neck stood straight up as I read it standing in my drive way:

“What did you think of my game? -from you’re old pal Chance”.

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