One Hundred and One Monochrome Mazes

Monochrome Mazes for the IBM PC

One Hundred and One Monochrome Mazes is an action/maze game released by IBM in 1983. The goal of the game is to complete 101 different mazes by guiding a constantly moving marker through them while avoiding the various traps and hazards.

The game screen consists of a maze where high intensity colors indicate walls and darker, low intensity colors indicated the safe paths players can navigate on. The player controls a marker (which looks like a rectangular box) that is constantly moving; if it runs into a wall, it will reflect and continue moving in the opposite direction. Players can use the cursor keys to change the direction of movement; the marker can also jump over a single block (that isn't a wall) by moving again in the direction the marker is already headed. Players enter each maze in the upper left corner and need to make it to the exit at the bottom right. Besides the maze itself, several types of hazards may be present to increase the difficulty. Some areas of the maze are black which indicate a pool; if the marker enters a pool, it will sink. Pools appear on every maze in the game; beginning on later, more difficult mazes invisible walls and trap doors appear. An invisible wall initially can't be seen; after a player runs into one, it will suddenly appear and remain visible while the marker rebounds off of it as it would for a normal wall. Trap doors open after a player crosses a block and leaves a pool in it's place allowing players to pass through but not return through the block. Most mazes will have a continous path from start to finish, however a few of the more difficult ones require players to use the jump feature to cross over a pool that blocks the path. There are 101 mazes total; each level in the game consists of 10 mazes of increasing difficulty. The final maze, number 101, is the most difficult in the game and combines all of the tricks and challenges found in prior mazes and more. Players can choose to play the mazes in any order and can select the speed of the marker and how scoring is tracked.

Two types of scoring options are available, or scoring can be turned off. The available scoring choices are:

• Count Points: Points are awarded based on the difficulty settings. This takes into account the speed selected for the marker, the difficulty of the maze, and the time taken to complete the maze. The higher the difficulty and quicker the completion time, the higher the score. If players fall into a pool before completing the maze, survival points are awarded based on how far into the maze the player made it (completing the maze without falling earns the most points). The game doesn't end if players fall into a pool, but time is lost.
• Time Runs: Points are awarded based solely on how quickly the maze is completed. Falling into a pool will end the round.
• No Score: Points and time are not tracked for the game.

As the game title implies, One Hundred and One Monochrome Mazes was designed to work only with the IBM monochrome display connected to an IBM MDA card (it will also work with some other monochrome cards, such as Hercules Monochrome, which support compatible 80-column text). The reason the game is incompatible with colors displays is due to it's implementation. While color cards, such as CGA, also offer an 80-column text mode (which is all the IBM MDA adapter could do), they would also inadvertently reveal maze items that were intended to be hidden as different colors; with the IBM MDA display, the different attributes selected for characters on the screen appear identical so the game takes advantage of this fact for storing hidden trap locations.