3D Maze

3D Maze is the name used for a screensaver made in OpenGL that was in Microsoft Windows from Windows 95 to Windows ME.

Overview

All mazes have random paths, and start at a floating start button. The maze is automatically solved with the left-hand rule, which always works because it is simply connected.

The maze has brick walls, a wooden floor and an asbestos tile ceiling. Custom pictures can be used. Later versions include animated psychedelic patterns.

The maze has floating "OpenGL" logos, globe images on the walls (from the OpenGL Programming Guide's cover), and an image of a rat also moving through the maze. Touching polyhedric gray rocks flips the camera upside down and swaps the floor and ceiling. Reaching the exit or touching another gray rock switches them back.

The maze's exit is a floating, translucent smiley face. Touching it resets the screensaver.

A 2D map, which uses simple vector graphics, can be enabled. The "player" is shown as a blue triangle, the start as a red triangle, the smiley face as a green triangle, the rocks as rotating white triangles, the OpenGL logos as stationary white triangles, and the rat as an orange triangle.

Legacy

Cornell University's Maze in a Box, which draws 3D graphics with a Atmel Mega32 microcontroller, was inspired by 3D Maze. In 2017, independent video game developer Cahoots Malone used assets from the original ssmaze.scr file to make it into Screensaver Subterfuge, a video game.

XScreenSaver 5.39, released in April 2018, has a similar screensaver, Maze3D, which was made by "Sudoer".

Reception

Writing for Bustle, Jessica Blankenship knew of nothing as "mesmerizing, alluring, frustrating, and exquisite" as getting lost in 3D Maze. Slate's Jacob Brogan said 3D Maze is a "harried, first-person rush through a brick-walled labyrinth" and similar to an "intelligence at work", and compared it to watching one's grandparents play Wolfenstein 3D "while sitting in silence as they haplessly mashed the keypad".