This conversion of Don Priestley‘s brilliant Spectrum game first appeared on the Commodore 64, courtesy of Andy French and DK’Tronics, in 1984. C64 fans tend to frown on conversions of Spectrum games to their system, but in this case they should be thanking their lucky stars, because Maziacs is a great little game.

It’s a simple maze game at heart, but Maziacs has a lot of charm and personality. In particular the player character, who I don’t think has a name but is superbly animated and humorous in his own little stick-man way. And also the titular Maziacs themselves – the monsters that chase you around the maze – are equally well designed and memorable.

The aim of the game is to find a chest of treasure and return it to the “put gold here” starting point. To find the treasure you can ask prisoners who’re chained to walls where it is and a yellow path will temporarily highlight to show you the correct route. You can also press ‘V’ to show an overhead map, but this costs energy. The two bars at the bottom of the screen show life energy (the top, red bar), and remaining time (the bottom, yellow bar). If either drops to zero then it’s ‘game over’.

You lose life energy with every step you take, and also with every fight you engage in with Maziacs. These skittish creatures move randomly around the maze but don’t actively seek you out. Fighting Maziacs means simply walking into them, but you really need to have a sword when you do that because fighting without a sword takes longer and has a higher chance of resulting in instant death (it’s a coin toss). Swords can be obtained by grabbing them off walls when you see them, as can food, which tops-up your life energy. Only by carefully exploring the maze and using swords, food, and talking to prisoners, can you find the gold, and once you have it returning it to the starting point is another task entirely.

When you do have the gold in your possession you must sometimes swap it for a sword, if you meet any Maziacs that need fighting, because engaging in combat with the treasure chest in your hands is the same as fighting bare-handed. You can simply ‘use’ a sword and the chest will transfer to the wall where the sword was located, until you return back to it. If you do manage to return to the start of the maze with the gold in your hands you’ll be rewarded with… a return to the title screen, and not much else. If you die there are various messages that taunt you, which is funny (for a short while).

Maziacs features three difficulty levels and each maze you play is randomly-generated, so is different every time. The gameplay is fun; sometimes frustrating; sometimes funny, and the C64 version is mostly the same as the Spectrum original. It’s definitely a game I think that everyone should play at least once in their lives.

I’d love to see a sequel, or someone building on Maziacs some day, because I think that it’s a classic game that could be expanded with a few new ideas.

Note: I was jumping for joy when I discovered an updated version of C64 Maziacs by Hokuto Force recently, which was released in February 2023. Other than a loading screen, a single bugfix, a trainer, and supplied instructions, there’s nothing else different about it, which is a little disappointing as I’d hoped they’d give it the royal treatment and add more to it (like extra features or difficulty levels). I’d say that the Hokuto Force version is still the version to play now, though.

See also: Mazogs (the ZX81 predecessor of Maziacs).

More: Maziacs on Wikipedia
More: Maziacs on CSDb