Mines of Minos

Mines of Minos was released for the Atari 2600 in 1982 by the small studio CommaVid, and it is one of those games where you can see the authors did not want to make yet another maze full of dots. You control a mining robot trapped in underground corridors patrolled by aliens, and your job is to find and destroy their command centre.

The most interesting part is how you defend yourself. You do not shoot ahead of you; you drop bombs and wait to see whether anything walks into them. That turns running through the corridors into a test of patience, because you have to guess the route an alien will take and let it walk into the blast on its own. The second oddity is how lives work. You start with no spare life at all, but robot parts are scattered around the maze, and once you gather enough for a whole body you earn an extra one. Collecting parts is your only safety net and the reason to enter corridors you would otherwise avoid.

Water supplies the pressure. The maze slowly floods, so you have a limited time before you are pushed down to the next level. Rising water, slow bomb laying and aliens that kill on contact make the game unusually claustrophobic, and a contemporary review described it as constant pressure with no rest.

By modern standards it is short and harsh, and the robot moves in a noticeably clumsy way. Play it with a second person, though, and they can take control of an alien, which turns it into a genuinely nasty chase. It is also worth noticing how legible the sprites are on such limited hardware.

On oldgame.cz you can play Mines of Minos straight in the browser, with nothing to install.