Entombed (Atari 2600)

Entombed is an Atari 2600 game designed by Tom Sloper and programmed by Steven Sidley.

The game's perplexing maze generation algorithm has attracted academic study.

"[5][3] Later research, however, suggests that although the original programmer and his mathematical collaborator did devise the algorithm at a bar, they may have suggested or encouraged the drunken blackout story merely to avoid having to explain or assign intellectual property rights for the algorithm.

[6] A 2021 paper described the algorithm for generating this lookup table and a generalization to three-dimensional mazes.

[7] A 2022 publication co-authored by Paul Allen Newell, a first-hand participant in the game development, has come closer to settling the debate about the mysteries of the maze algorithm.

A representation of the maze generation scheme for two rows of a typical maze from Entombed . [ 3 ] The algorithm uses five neighboring squares (bold outline) that are either open (white) or a wall (grey) to generate the state of the next square (bold 0 or 1) in a semi-random manner.