Crystal Caves Play Online
Ahmend Studioz
A mind-bending game. Constantly toying with the player's perception of what's conceivable. A plethora of wacky characters inhabit these zany caverns in which our main protagonist will go to any lengths to acquire those gorgeous multi-coloured crystals.
We bought Crystal Caves and a few other games on 5.25" discs from a shareware catalog in the early 1990s. My parents were fairly strict about the time we spent on the computer--no more than one hour per day, and we had to log what we did during our time. Crystal Caves was my most frequent entry for months on end. My brothers and sister played a lot, too. I was bored one day and trying to remember some of the games we used to play and found this site--what fun!
Back in the 90'es I was a music-teacher, and dedicated to use computer with my keyboards. The first computer we bought had installed Crystal Caves by one of my young students; Stefan. It stole my nights. I had trouble explaining why I did not come home after work. When I was supposed to practise my skills as a musician, I jumped around, shooting and collecting diamonds in Crystal Caves. I am still music-teacher. Stefan got a job in Hewlett Packard.
Mylo Steamwitz must get all the crystals in each screen ("cave") to win that screen, but this requires shooting foes (with the need to replenish ammo), avoid shooting air supplies, find & turn on the lights, and turn switches on or off. Though mostly straight shoot-em-up, the game does involve some careful problem solving, with the risk of mistakes that make completing the cave impossible. He enters and leaves caves by doors to individual rooms from a central cavern, which doors function in-game as teleportation booths.
Step 1:
Go to the classicreload site. In the top right of your browser screen, find an icon with "ad blocker" or something similar in the title (hover or click the icons to find out what they do.)
Crystal Caves is a side-scrolling platform game developed and published by Apogee Software for IBM PC compatibles. The game is divided into three episodes with the first distributed as shareware and the other two available for purchase. Designer Frank Maddin said the method worked "pretty well" for the time.[2] Crystal Caves was inspired by the 1982 game Miner 2049er for Atari 8-bit computers.
Mylo Steamwitz is a down-on-the-luck space trader. Each game in the series follows Mylo going to the planet Altair to collect enough crystals from its mines to finance his latest get-rich-quick scheme.
Twibbles are the hottest new pet in the galaxy, so Mylo hopes to earn enough crystals to buy a twibble farm. He succeeds and buys his farm, but twibbles breed so quickly that the market is soon over-saturated, and Mylo is stuck with a planet overrun with twibbles.
After selling his twibble farm for a loss, Mylo heads back to Altair. A recent war has created a demand for medicinal slugs, so now Mylo wants to buy a slug farm. He collects enough crystals to do so, and for a while, business is booming, but the slugs soon burrow their way into an abandoned salt mine and perish, depriving Mylo of his stock.
A late-night infomercial inspires Mylo to quit farming and try his hand at real estate. He collects enough crystals to buy an entire solar system from Rip Eweoff. Mylo plans to turn the system into a vacation resort: tropical getaways on the inner planets, ski slopes on the outer planets, and luxury hotels in the middle. However, mere minutes after he buys the solar system, the star goes supernova, destroying the system. As Mylo looks at the nebula where the solar system once was, he comes up with an idea. He builds a restaurant overlooking the nebula. Thanks to its spectacular view of the nebula, the restaurant becomes the hottest spot in the galaxy, and Mylo finally makes his millions.
The game begins in a main level containing the entrances to 16 caves. To complete the game, Mylo must collect all the crystals in all the caves. Mylo can complete the caves in whichever order he chooses. Mylo can quit a cave at any time, but in doing so, will negate all progress he made in that level.
Mylo begins each level with three hit points. If all hit points are lost, the player goes back to the start of the level. If a level is finished with all hit points, the player gets a bonus score of $50,000.
Crystal Caves was inspired by Miner 2049er.[citation needed] The main character's name, "Mylo Steamwitz", was coined by George Broussard and was meant to sound like a loser's name. Most graphics were created by Frank Maddin.[3]
This is Part 2 of 8 of my History of 3D Realms / Apogee series. When originally published, it was a single post, but over time WordPress ended up not liking a post that was 33,000 words long. This segment covers 1988-1991.
It was discontinued ages ago. Was released as freeware on 23 Dec 2005, and then re-released again with source code on 20 Mar 2009. It is still available on the 3D Realms FTP site. It is also available to play online over at The Internet Archive.
Similar to the other two Whiz games, except this one was all about Star Trek, and written by Scott Miller. Used the same game engine, too. After it was released, Apogee was threatened legally by Paramount over this title due to not having a license for Star Trek. Rather than fight the suit, Apogee withdrew distribution to the title, and relinquished all legal claim to the game. Due to that legal issue, I will not be linking to the game, nor providing a screenshot.
From a gameplay standpoint, you can see games from this era progressing on from Kroz, but the ASCII beginnings of the company are still here in force. This was done by Todd Replogle, later known for Duke Nukem.
This is a CGA platformer written by George Broussard and put out through his own Micro/FX company. It was later to become a purely Apogee game. It is similar to Monuments of Mars in feel, but was developed separately and technically different engines. George himself said this on Twitter.
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