In 1979 my high school friends and I used to play a game on paper that was essentially "light cycles". We used a sheet of graph paper and took turns extending our previous walls (each drawn with a different color using a fancy four color pen) by one more square.

None of us has access to computers back then, though our science fair project that year was a microprocessor based video game (using the Signetics 2650). We ran out of time to implement our own games, but "cycles" would have been our second right after "pong".

I did not think of having a character at the leading edge of the wall until I watched "Tron", however. And then I did implement it like that on my TI99/4A including the movie's theme music.

While I couldn't find the name of the paper version of the game we played, it seems that there was already a two player arcade version in 1976 called "Blockade" by Gremlin.