The first virtual world was created in 1974. And this story is worthy of a film adaptation. It has it all - Silicon Valley, a wise mentor, three high school students and cool ideas. The Maze was created by high school student Greg Thompson as an experiment for NASA. After going to MIT, Greg and 2 classmates refined the maze into a game. Players took on the role of a flying eye, an avatar, and moved through the maze, moving forward, backward, or rotating 90 degrees to the left or right. The goal was simple: find and shoot the enemy. If you hit an enemy, you got 10 points and he lost five. The game came with a map, the ability to look around corners, cheats, mods, a map editor, AI bots, and even streaming for viewers. Maze War was played over the Arpanet, the prototype of the Internet, between universities. The game went viral. Maze War was way ahead of its time and was the first in many ways. The first real-time online multiplayer game. The first three-dimensional virtual reality game. More importantly, the creation of Maze War is the reason why no one can claim ownership of the rights to the invention of multiplayer three-dimensional cyberspace.

Player Ted Koehler's story (link to picture below) - "Here is a cartoon I drew when MazeWar was new at PARC. I think the cartoon was from 1980. Harold Hall was the new head of the Systems Science Lab, SSL. He often came looking for people that he did not know. LRG is the Learning Research Group, and I and Bob Flegal were in it. I think he actually did pop in and say he was looking for Bob Flegal when one of us was playing MazeWar. I immediately drew this cartoon and posted it on the wall."