1981, the year Set the Hostages Free was released on DOS. Made by TexaSoft and published by TexaSoft, this action game is available for free on this page.
Squirm is a Snake-like game in which the player searches for diamonds; to his dismay, the precious stones are guarded by packs of ghosts. These supernatural ghosts - for their own ghostly reasons - line up in tight, orderly rows that march horizontally across the screen. Your task is to sneak past the ghosts and grab the lone, blinking diamonds without getting caught.
Unlike most Snake variants, you are free to touch walls, reverse course, or travel through your own tail without penalty. When you (or the ghosts!) snatch a diamond, a new one will appear elsewhere; if you're the lucky one to catch it, you'll earn 100 points and a longer body. You only have one life to accumulate as much loot as you can: one touch from a ghost and your hoarding is over.
The Queen of Hearts Maze Game and Treasure Hunt are two of the earliest commercial maze games, both released in 1982. There is not much to say, except that the former is a top-down ASCII maze game similar to Pac-Man, while the latter is a 3D CGA maze game played from a first-person perspective.
However, the games bring some innovations to the simplistic maze escape gameplay: The Queen of Hearts lets you change the difficulty level, while Treasure Hunt can display an automatic 2D map of the maze to help you navigate. Your goal in both games is similar: collect as many treasures/point objects as you can, while avoiding creeps.
