Why 1994’s Lair of Squid was the weirdest pack-in game of all time

In 1994, Hewlett-Packard released a miracle machine: the HP 200LX pocket-size PC. In the depths of the device, among the MS-DOS productivity apps built into its fixed memory, there lurked a first-person maze game called Lair of Squid. Intrigued by the game, we tracked down its author, Andy Gryc, and probed into the title's mysterious undersea origins.

"If you ask my family, they’ll confirm that I’ve been obsessed with squid for a long time," Gryc told Ars Technica. "It’s admittedly very goofy—and that’s my fault—although I was inspired by Doom, which had come out relatively recently."

In Lair of Squid, you're trapped in an underwater labyrinth, seeking a way out while avoiding squid roaming the corridors. A collision with any cephalopod results in death. To progress through each stage and ascend to the surface, you locate the exit and provide a hidden, scrambled code word. The password is initially displayed as asterisks, with letters revealed as you encounter them within the maze.

A photo of Lair of Squid running on the author's HP 200LX, shortly after the moment of discovery.

Credit: Benj Edwards

Buckle up for a tale of rogue coding, cephalopod obsession, and the most unexpected Easter egg in palmtop history. This is no fish story—it's the saga of Lair of Squid.

A computer in the palm of your hand

Introduced in 1994, the HP 200LX palmtop PC put desktop functionality in a pocket-size package. With a small QWERTY keyboard, MS-DOS compatibility, and a suite of productivity apps, the clamshell 200LX offered a vision of one potential future of mobile computing. It featured a 7.91 MHz 80186 CPU, a monochrome 640x200 CGA display, and 1–4 megabytes of RAM.

The cover of the HP 200LX User's Guide (1994).

Credit: Hewlett Packard

I've collected vintage computers since 1993, and people frequently offer to send me old devices they'd rather not throw away. Recently, a former HP engineer sent me his small but nice collection of '90s HP handheld palmtop computers, including a 95LX (1991), 100LX (1993), and 200LX.

HP designed its portable LX series to run many MS-DOS programs that feature text mode or CGA graphics, and each includes built-in versions of the Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet, a word processor, terminal program, calculator, and more.

I owned a 95LX as a kid (a hand-me-down from my dad's friend), which came with a simplistic overhead maze game called TigerFox. So imagine my surprise in 2024, when trawling through the productivity and personal organization apps on that 200LX, to find a richly detailed first-person maze game based around cephalopods, of all things.

(I was less surprised to find an excellent built-in Minesweeper clone, Hearts and Bones, which is definitely a more natural fit for the power and form of the 200LX itself.)

Lair of Squid isn't a true Doom clone since it's not a first-person shooter (in some ways, it's more like a first-person Pac-Man without pellets), but its mere existence—on a black-and-white device best suited for storing phone numbers and text notes—deserves note as one of the weirdest and most interesting pack-in games to ever exist.

Just after discovering Lair of Squid on my device earlier this year, I tweeted about it, and I extracted the file for the game (called "maze.exe") from the internal ROM drive and sent it to DOS gaming historian Anatoly Shashkin, who put the game on The Internet Archive so anyone can play it in their browser.

After that, I realized that I wanted to figure out who wrote this quirky game, and thanks to a post on RGB Classic Games, I found a name: Andy Gryc. With some luck in cold-emailing, I found him.

The call of the squid

Today, Gryc runs a small business that does B2B marketing for automotive tech. But in the 1990s, he worked as a software engineer for Hewlett-Packard, where he was part of the development team for HP palmtop computers.

As the newbie on the team and an "out of school" hire, Gryc contributed to various aspects of the palmtop's software, including creating Lair of Squid, which he designed to work within the constraints of the HP 200LX's hardware. But the project had to fly under HP management's radar, coded in spare hours in between sessions of "serious" work.

A photo of Hearts and Bones, another built-in 200LX game, coded by Everett Kaser.

Credit: Benj Edwards

"At some point, I found out that Everett Kaser (another member of the HP palmtop software team) was going to add a game to the product called Hearts and Bones," Gryc says. "It wasn’t officially sanctioned, but our boss was willing to turn a blind eye provided it was 'harmless.'" Gryc wanted to do the same—not only as a fun coding exercise, but as a minor form of digital immortality packed into ROM code: "It was a way to say, 'I was here.'"

Inspired by 1993's groundbreaking first-person shooter Doom, Gryc set out to craft his own 3D gaming experience within the confines of the 200LX. "There was no way my game could be anything like Doom with the limitations I was working with," Gryc recalls. Size, development time, and subject matter were all factors. As an unofficial "freebie," Lair of Squid needed to be small, quick to develop, and "strictly G-rated."

Development challenges

Gryc found the development process of Lair of Squid to be intense and time-constrained. He recalls, "I don't remember how much time I had, but I needed to write it in a relatively short amount of time so we could ensure it got in before code freeze. It was a crazy time of late nights and weekends."

This time pressure contributed to some of the game's quirky features and limitations. One of the biggest challenges Gryc faced was trying to figure out how to make a game that was "non-interactive," as he puts it. "The biggest no-no in 200LX coding was burning cycles: the longer you ran, the more battery you drained. Everything was designed to run as short and efficiently as it could, then to give control back to the system, which would shut down most of the chip subsystems until the user woke things back up with the next key press. For something designed to run over a month on 2 AA batteries, power consumption was always one of the highest priorities."

A photo of Lair of Squid running on the author's HP 200LX, shortly after the moment of discovery.

Credit: Benj Edwards

This eliminated any possibility for writing an arcade-style game that was constantly active. Gryc had to figure out how to merge the cool visuals of a "Doom-like" maze with step-by-step action. Having the antagonists move in lockstep with the player turned it from an action game into a logic game—but it was really boring without adding the letter clues and password that forced you to explore the maze.

Another major challenge was drawing the maze. Although the system hardware had built-in routines to write bitmaps to the display, they couldn't skew or scale, so Gryc had to write the routines to fake perspective himself. Thankfully, because of the game constraints, what was needed to emulate a sense of 3D in Lair of Squid was very limited. The angles and positions are fixed by the maze, and the player only makes 90-degree turns.

Gryc drew the game's graphics by hand on graph paper, converting the black-and-white squares into hexadecimal to be typed directly into the program. But rendering Lair of Squid's pseudo-3D perspective pushed the 200LX to its limits. Gryc wrote custom routines using Bresenham's line algorithm to draw the maze walls with a sense of depth. "I realized I could use a couple of simultaneous Bresenham algorithms to walk the top and bottom of the trapezoid, and then iterate a bitmask from the top line edge to the bottom, grabbing the needed bits out of the tile map for the screen."

He wrote the tile draw in assembly so it was fast enough—everything else was straightforward C. Even so, Gryc notes, you can watch the walls individually draw since the device just had an 8 MHz CPU.

Easter eggs and personal touches

Gryc snuck some personal touches into Lair of Squid, like an Easter egg that displays photos of the development team, accessed by typing "GALLERY" at the title screen. "My biggest regret has always been that Jean Gilbert and Stan Blascow happened to be away from their desks during the short period we had the camera," laments Gryc. "Stupid me that I didn't think to just write their names up on the wall!"

A photo of the "GALLERY" Easter egg that features developer photos in Lair of Squid, running on the author's HP 200LX.

Credit: Benj Edwards

The inclusion of the gallery Easter egg was a rare treat for the time, requiring the use of a digital camera, which wasn't common in those days. Gryc explains, "[Fellow HP developer Everett Kaser] was able to borrow one for a couple hours, and we surreptitiously took a pic of our boss and then the others on the software team. That gave me a handful of low-res (but recognizable) pictures on a floppy."

As for the quirky squid theme? Gryc named the game himself and reached back to his love of the saltwater creatures: "They’re such totally cool animals: 10 arms, beaks, better-designed eyes than humans, jet-propelled, and ink cloud defense. What's not to like?" He tried to find a setting for the maze that was unique enough not to get sued by other game developers. "I eventually thought—well, why not have squid?"

Despite being unofficial, the game was included in the product with the tacit approval of management, serving as Gryc's way of leaving his mark on the device.

A run-in with a Byte legend

While Lair of Squid may have been a fun diversion, Gryc's development journey on the 200LX wasn't without its challenges. He recounts butting heads with Lotus over a windowing system and a disheartening encounter with a rude tech columnist. At a major conference where Gryc was representing the new HP palmtop, science fiction author and Byte magazine columnist Jerry Pournelle approached the HP booth.

Recognizing the well-known tech personality, Gryc was initially star-struck. However, the encounter quickly soured when Pournelle questioned Gryc about the device's processor. When Gryc answered that it used an 80186, Pournelle brusquely dismissed him, claiming, "There is no such thing, and you don't know what you're talking about." Despite Gryc's attempts to explain the specifics of the embedded 80186 variant, Pournelle remained unconvinced and walked away with a curt "Harumph." The incident left a lasting impression on Gryc, who recalls, "I couldn't get over how rude he was. I subsequently stopped reading his column—it always was long-winded and circuitous anyway."

But looking back, Gryc says the camaraderie of the 200LX team shines through the tough times. "The team was very kind to their newest member, and I always felt like a peer and not 'just a kid.'"

Lair of Squid may not be a household name, but it embodies the spirit of creativity and determination that has always driven the game industry forward. As Gryc's journey shows, inspiration can strike anywhere—even in the depths of an underwater maze, with squid in hot pursuit.

If you want to read more about Lair of Squid, check out the full interview transcript preserved here in its entirety for history's sake.