The Queen of Hearts Maze Game

The Queen of Hearts Maze Game was published by TexaSoft in 1982 and is one of the very first commercial maze games for the IBM PC. That is worth knowing before you start, because otherwise you would dismiss it in a couple of minutes. It is a top down maze drawn out of characters, in which four cards are missing from your deck and you have to collect them before the cardsharks catch you.

The model it follows is obvious and the game makes no secret of it: you run through corridors, the pursuers split up, and if you grab one of the four power ups hidden in the corners of the maze, the roles reverse for a while and you get to hunt them. The difference from the arcade original is that instead of clearing a field of dots you are after four specific cards, so each round is a route out to four points and back to safety.

There are five difficulty levels, keyboard or joystick control and a choice between colour and monochrome display, which was not a given at the time. On the lowest setting it is a stroll; on the highest the pursuers move fast enough that planning your route around the corners beats taking the shortest path.

To be honest it is a very simple thing and it stays interesting only briefly. The sound is beeping, animation barely exists, and your fiftieth attempt looks exactly like your fifth. Its real value is as evidence of what games looked like when the PC had a text mode and authors had to make do with whatever the screen could print.

On oldgame.cz it runs straight in your browser, with no installation and no emulator to configure.