Ep.293 – An Unsolvable Maze: The Secret Algorithm Behind Entombed (1982)

About this episode

The episode explores the origins and algorithm behind the 1982 Atari 2600 game Entombed, including its development and the challenges faced in maze generation.

In 1982, Western Technologies released Entombed for the Atari 2600, a scrolling maze game published by a division of Quaker Oats that almost nobody played and nearly everyone forgot. In this episode, we trace the game's origins inside a freewheeling Santa Monica development shop, the night a UCLA film student and a math grad student solved a maze problem at a bar, and how the answer got handed off, stripped down, and shipped without anyone fully understanding what they had. We explore the Atari 2600's brutal constraints, what it actually takes to generate an infinite and solvable maze on 128 bytes of RAM, and why a lookup table that worked perfectly stumped researchers for forty years. Our conversation also covers the 2018 paper that went viral, the drunk programmer story that wasn't quite the whole truth, and the moment the man who actually wrote the algorithm finally came forward. Join us as we run the maze, dodge the zombies, and uncover the secret algorithm behind Entombed on today's trip down Memory Card Lane. Read transcript

People in this episode

Hosts: David Kassin, Robert Kassin

Topics covered

• video game history
• Atari 2600
• game development
• algorithm
• maze generation
• programming stories

Keywords

• Entombed
• Atari 2600
• maze algorithm
• game development
• video game history
• UCLA
• Western Technologies
• Quaker Oats

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Western Technologies, Quaker Oats, UCLA

Books & works: Entombed

Places: Santa Monica

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