Actually from the game
Adventure (or
Colossal Cave or
Advent), an
adventure game of the
elder days that featured
fiendishly difficult puzzles such as this one.
It was a
blind maze in which drawing out standard
NESW maps was useless since paths weren't retraceable by going back in the opposite direction. The label for each intersection was "
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike." It may have been a
directed graph, I forget. Having the big printed
cheat map was invaluable in solving this problem.
Also a handy
geeky phrase to use in situations where you are completely lost, especially while looking at over-detailed
flowcharts or poorly-written reference material.
There were also
dwarves that chased you around the
maze and threw
hatchets at you. Sometimes they would kill you. Chasing the dwarves almost always got you
even loster.