Games That Weren't®

Speaking recently with Paul Allen Newell, who helped with the Games That Weren’t book due to his Vectrex connections, Paul flagged up with us recent stories of how his endless maze algorithm (developed for the Atari 2600) caused a bit of attention. Where researchers tried to figure out how it worked and who did what, as well as resolving mythologies uncovered in the process. It made for fascinating reading and I loved how everything came to light over a period of time.

Rather than re-tell the entire story which is covered elsewhere in great detail, we are sharing links to the various papers, podcasts, and pages that have been published in chronological order, so you can see and read through the journey which would eventually lead to the original prototype code being made available.  If anything else comes to light which is new information, we will add it here.

First of all – back in 2018, an academic paper was published by Aycock and Copplestone, which would carry out an archaeological examination (archaeogaming) of an Atari 2600 game called Entombed, containing an endless maze algorithm which had staggered the researchers:

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