Crystal Caves

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Crystal Caves

Developer(s)	Apogee Software
Publisher(s)	Apogee Software
Designer(s)	Frank Maddin
Platform(s)	MS-DOS
Release date	23 October 1991
Genre(s)	Side scrolling platform game
Mode(s)	Single player
Rating(s)	NA
Media	Floppy disk (1)
System requirements	80286 CPU, 512KB RAM, EGA graphic card
Input methods	Keyboard, Joystick

Crystal Caves is a video game written and published by Apogee Software. In the game, you are Mylo Steamwitz, a space miner who wants to get rich quick. In order to invest in some ridiculous get-rich-quick schemes, including, but not limited to, starting a "twibble" farm (compare with tribble), he travels to the Altairian star system, and ventures into the caves in the planets there to harvest large, naturally grown crystals.

Mylo comes with a rocket launcher (due to small graphic size, it is hard to determine the exact weapon; it may be a humorously large pistol) and has to jump and shoot his way through the levels to collect all crystals. The game has a number of identifying features, such as a gravity inversion powerup, and an unexpected death when you accidentally shoot out a level's air generator.

Like most Apogee games, this game was released in three episodes (known as volumes), the first one being shareware. It was not very popular, because its graphics, animation, gameplay, and level design were inferior to those of the Commander Keen series that was released around the same time. The three volumes are called: The Trouble with Twibbles, Slugging It Out, and Mylo Versus the Supernova.

Crystal Caves uses the same game engine as Secret Agent, which was released about a year later.

On October 24, 2005, Apogee released a maintenance patch to fix a bug in the game. The bug sets the user's system clock backwards 100 years after running any of the three episodes on some systems using Windows XP. As the game was released 14 years and one day earlier, Apogee may now hold the record for longest time between an initial game release and a maintenance patch.

[edit] Trivia

Frank Maddin, the game's designer, found out that David Gerrold, the script writer for the Star Trek episode The Trouble With Tribbles (which the game's first episode parodied) played Crystal Caves, and referred to it in a computer magazine for which he was a contributor.[1]