Via the Internet Archive. The “Back-Up Program Certificate” is intended for getting one (1) copy for back-up use in case the original disk gets busted.
It’s hard to give a “narrative” of everything that happened because I had found most of the map already; progressing to the end involved finding the extra hidden pieces, plus one extra annoyance at the end which we’ll get to.
Let’s talk about the mansion (or at the game sometimes switches to, house) first. The new rooms are marked in red:
I spent a significant amount of time eye-balling the verb list I had made and trying every action I thought was reasonable on every object I thought was reasonable.
For example, upstairs there is a globe, and I realized I hadn’t tried to ROTATE it, which seems a reasonable thing to apply to a globe.
You can BREAK GLOBE (putting a “SMALL HOLE” in the bottom) and then do ROTATE GLOBE again to get a RUBY to fall out, yielding one of the glorious treasures.
Downstairs, at the statue I was having trouble with, I had tried PUSH but apparently not PULL:
This opens a secret room with a bracelet (more treasure) plus a stool. I already knew the picture in the study had been described as out of reach, so I decided to try to drop it there and STAND ON STOOL. While the picture still can’t be taken, I went back to the verb list and hit paydirt with MOVE.
This yields a SILVER CANDLEABRA and is the last treasure just lying about the house where things get stored.
Up next comes the parachute. I had theorized two posts ago that while the parachute is fatal from the opening chasm, it might still work elsewhere, but I hadn’t systematically tried it out yet. The parachute was next to message about “following in my footsteps” and I realized a cave near a fissure had footsteps leading to it, so it was a very good candidate to try:
Oho! The area this lands in includes a bottle of rare wine (treasure) a message (“hot or cold, warm or cool, the sapphires free if you can find the tool”) which is supposed to be a hint. You go via one-way exit back up to the “random exits” room.
I say “supposed to” be a hint because it led me astray for a while. I did realize where they were: you see them if you examine the icicle in the ice room. However, I thought the hint meant I just need to apply the right tool directly to the icicle (or rather, because tools sometimes get used passively, apply all the possible verbs while holding as many tools as possible).
I was looking in the wrong direction. I needed to go back to the furnace, with a dial I had attempted to TURN but was denied. Just like the FLOOR BOARDS, this was a case with a deceptive parser message; TURN DIAL is right, it just can only be done while holding the PLIERS (which I thought I was holding but I had apparently juggled them to my storage pile while testing other things).
With this done, you can go back to where the icicle was and nab the treasure.
The melting ice also reveals an exit to the north, leading to yet another treasure (a goblet). I did not catch this at first because I had already thoroughly done mapping via testing exits, and that route didn’t occur to me as a “future exit” that I should mark down.
Back at where the furnace was, another path led up to a Venus flytrap. As Matt W. guessed in the comments, the burger back at the house works to satiate it; it drops a rare stamp when you do so and opens a path by.
Before showing what is just past, I should highlight an item I’ve mentioned already but given no detail on: a magazine you can find by digging into some sand. The contents seem cryptic and I originally thought they could be an Easter egg style reference akin to the magazine in Crowther/Woods.
Just past the flytrap is a computer room (the door is locked, but the key that unlocked the main gate also unlocks this door). While this game is “modern” so it doesn’t feel comparatively jarring, I’m still reminded of Microsoft Adventure tossing a hacker’s den in the game for some reason.
I also got stumped for a very strange reason. Here was my initial conception of the map:
To be clear, this is WRONG.
Take a look at the room description and see if you can spot my mistake:
My brain, zeroing in on “the only exit lies to the north”, assumed the other directional references (“disk drive” to the east, “printer” to the west, “computer” to the south) were positional references and not actual directions that you can take. I’m going to blame myself for this one, mostly — except the parser’s non-responsiveness was such that I could refer to the printer and computer and disk drive in such a way it wasn’t obvious they were far away!
With the extra rooms filled in, the computer wasn’t difficult to get started. First, the disk from outdoors needs to go into a drive that has two buttons (push red button to start, blue button to open, PUT DISK IN DRIVE, blue button to close). Then the computer has a LOAD button that must be pressed, and three prompts must be given responses based on the magazine buried in the sand:
Without the magazine this would be a hassle, since there wasn’t a way to realize where to hunt for the missing information.
The printer then gives a PRINTOUT which I showed in my last post: a map of a maze.
Let’s jump ahead to that — remember from last time you need to pry the FLOOR BOARDS / FLOORBOARDS, causing you to fall down into a new area. Heading north goes past a bridge over lava and into a maze.
Inside the maze is a violin and a power pack. (I never used the power pack. I assume it recharges the lamp, but I never got low enough during normal play to worry; I only had it start to flicker when I was first making my map and testing every single exit in every single room to make sure I didn’t miss anything. Ha. Ha ha.)
Leaving then goes through the iron panel I was puzzled about:
As I suspected, I was essentially done with everything here. I had in fact found all the treasures:
I was short some points, and completely baffled as to why. I went through the walkthrough on CASA and combed through “drop” messages looking for the list of treasures, double-confirming I wasn’t missing anything. I eventually resorted to just restarting the game and running through the walkthrough wholesale, before realizing I had missed passing over the quicksand.
GET BOULDER and the like (which tried before) failed. I might assume PICK here means “apply pickaxe” except this action works even if you aren’t holding the pickaxe. I have no idea how to visualize what is happening.
I bestow the title of Second Worst Spot in the Game. Passing through is otherwise completely optional since there’s another way around.
I think, based on what Roger Durrant was alluding to in my comments, if you are short the points here but then take care of the boulder, you win the game right on the spot. This feels rather more unsatisfying than dropping off the final treasures, but since I was just repeating the walkthrough I took it all the way to the end.
Despite the hiccups already mentioned I did enjoy myself overall; there was a sense of combing for clues that other Treasure Hunt crawlers from this era tend not to have (with notable exception: some of the additions made to Crowther/Woods, like in Adventure 430, but most of those aren’t consistent with the rest of the game). I could see leaning in the direction of Mansion Adventure and making a Columbo Goes on a Dungeon Crawl game with lots of backtracking and cross-checking details.
Other than the obvious follow-up of Crime Stopper, I don’t see a clear link with the rest of Dan Kitchen’s output. Garry’s reverse engineering eventually led to him getting hired by Activision; Dan Kitchen went to Activision as well. Dan did still work on some Apple II games, most notably on the ports of Little Computer People and (Activision’s) Gamemaker.
I’ve combed over Dan Kitchen’s credits and the closest he gets to another adventure game is much later in life where he is the designer on a 2010 “casual” adventure titled Romancing the Seven Wonders: Taj Mahal (think hidden object puzzles, tangrams, etc.)
Via Mobygames.
At least in a business sense, the fact Garry and Dan founded a company early is important; it granted the independence to outlast Activision imploding after its transformation into Mediagenic, such that Dan’s credits are given to over 150 games, and he still remains active in the industry, with a recent release of a new Atari 2600 game, Casey’s Gold.
Coming up: Dr. Who, followed by a Western, followed by some naughty games courtesy a company in Ohio (with ads saucy enough to kick up an angry letter to a magazine editor).
I’m hovering near the ending, but I think it will be better for me to finish before I give all the discoveries. I wanted here to focus on something I found relatively late — so late I suspect I might only have one or two puzzles to go — and it ended up being a uniquely horrendous parser moment that’s worth close attention.
Title screen from the Commodore 64 version of the game.
This goes back to the above-ground part of the game around the mansion. I had by then discovered a few secrets inside, but I had already discarded the shed outside as being a mere container of objects and not of secrets. This is for good reason:
The only thing that seemed somewhat suspicious, the FLOOR BOARDS, did not even exist as a noun.
Here’s the issue: while the game does not let you refer to BOARDS or FLOOR BOARDS (following the exact spelling of the game), it does let you refer to FLOORBOARDS.
The “nothing under” is already pretty deceptive but at least the noun her is acknowledged (note this problem wouldn’t have occurred had it been a five-letter parser rather than a six-letter parser!) But wait, there’s more! … if you try to LIFT FLOORBOARDS the game simply says
YOU CAN’T DO THAT.
which the game normally does anyway for any other use of the verb! However, if you happen to also be holding the crowbar from underground, the game passively uses the crowbar and you can get inside (using either LIFT or PRY).
To recap, this is spectacularly bad in multiple layers:
a.) first off, the noun conveyed in the text is not the same spelling as what the parser is required
b.) even if you have the right spelling, the verb LOOK UNDER acts as if it doesn’t hide anything
c.) even if you have the right action, if you aren’t holding the crowbar you get a deceptive message
I’ve seen instances of each of these three (noun mismatch, deceptive response to a descriptive action, deceptive response to an action the game doesn’t consider valid) but I’m failing to remember a case where I had all three at once.
I needed a walkthrough. If this was one of a restricted number of rooms I might have persisted a bit longer with at least my noun troubles, but keep in mind this is one location of many, and in many cases room description elements are just there for color.
The only thing that saves the moment slightly is the roaring sound. That’s supposed to indicate that this is very close a lava flow river that is below. Heading north leads to…
YOU ARE NOW IN A TREMENDOUS UNDERGROUND CHAMBER THROUGH WHICH A RAGING LAVA RIVER FLOWS. THE RIVER ORIGINATES FROM A LARGE CRACK IN THE EASTERN WALL OF THE CHAMBER ANO DISAPPEARS INTO A LARGE ABYSS IN THE FLOOR TO THE WEST. TO THE NORTH, A RICKETY WOODEN FOOTBRIDGE SPANS THE LAVA RIVER ABOUT 10′ ABOVE ITS SURFACE. STEAM RISES FROM THE RIVER ANO FILLS THE CHAMBER. A PATH LEADS SOUTH.
…which is vivid but wasn’t quite worth it.
Past the bridge is a maze. At least stalling on the “floor boards” puzzle gave me enough time I already had this printout from another puzzle by the time I arrived at the maze.
I’ve revealed enough of the map that it is time for an update. Last time I left off on entering the mansion depicted on the title screen.
Unlike, say, Windmere Estate, there’s not many rooms at the house itself; the underground is where most of the rooms are. The game also seems to keep up a fairly high room-to-important-object number, and I have to add the “seems to” because there’s details in the room description that the parser technically recognizes. That doesn’t mean anything will happen with them, though!
Just to illustrate the inherent issue, here’s me attempting to get something to happen in the hallway with stairs and a statue:
On the map I marked a chandelier in a drawing room just because it was the only item in the room of importance, and in the parlor I zeroed in on the picture (GET PICTURE: “I CAN’T REACH IT”) but I’m just guessing here. This is the inherent problem with having a game where manipulatable objects fall in the room description; because the parser isn’t going to handle any of the “non-working” objects with more than default messages the amount of effort it takes to find a secret gets multiplied.
Also, there’s a burger in the abandoned kitchen full of cobwebs. It is safe to eat (“THANK YOU! IT WAS DELICIOUS!”) although it might need to be used on an obstacle.
Upstairs there’s a “small bedroom” (SLEEP BED: “I HOPE YOU’RE RESTED NOW!”) and a study with a ladder that can be climbed.
The ladder leads to a trap door with rusted hinges; the oil can from out in the shed can be used to OIL HINGES and go inside.
The cupola is where the treasures go. Once again we have a scenario with a “Treasure Hunt” where it feels more like the player is redecorating rather than scarfing for profit. (The type-in Spelunker from 1979 remains the only case I’ve come across that does actual currency conversion even though treasure gets hawked in CRPGs all the time.)
In order to get underground you need to visit that suspicious stump outside I mentioned last time, but first, an attempt at using the parachute, back at that elaborately-described chasm.
I don’t know if we’re intended to fix the parachute — no verbs I tried had any effect — or if this is all a big red herring. (Or, alternately, there’s a place later where the parachute will open properly.) While I’m at it, here’s the verb list as I have it so far:
Noteworthy, KICK but no other method of hitting things (no SMASH or KILL or ATTACK), both SIT and STAND, LIFT (which is often its own isolated thing to find secrets), and MELT. None of these suggest repairing a parachute even with the right items.
Back in the forest there was a stump that didn’t react to any of my commands, but I hadn’t tried it on the shovel yet. DIG does not work on its own; it needs a target. It also isn’t a single-use item because I’ve already used it twice more, so I’m now keeping constant lookout for sandy and/or unstable ground.
The underground is designed along the lines of long tunnels rather than dense interconnections. Starting from the bottom of a long hole, headed north there is an intersection, and essentially three different routes:
a.) east past some GOLD TOOTHPICKS to a Quarry. The quarry has a pickaxe (which I haven’t put to use yet) and a large boulder, but it is possible to push the boulder out of the way…
…revealing another room with treasure (a small chamber with a necklace) which appears to be a dead-end.
b.) down to a place with many passages where you are invited to “choose at random”; this does the Crowther/Woods trick of sometimes having an exit loop you back to the room you’re in rather than a secondary destination.
From here, one side passage just leads to a “cubbyhole” with a rare painting, but three others are or seem to relate to puzzles.
To the northwest, there is a compass on the floor. With it in hand, you see it start spinning as you get closer to an electric generator and a computer. The HARD DRIVE found outdoors is suggestive but I haven’t been able to find any verbs that use the two together.
To the southwest, there’s a furnace with a red dial. I have not found any way of interacting with the dial.
To the west, there’s a venus flytrap. Not much to say here; I probably need to feed it.
Backtracking to the junction near the start, going north isn’t a full-fledged route because of some quicksand in the way. It could be a puzzle but there’s a room later that might just be the other side. I’ll still keep it in mind if any obvious traversal methods arise.
c.) Going west from the starting junction first passes through a “frozen ice” room with a giant icicle (I’m guessing MELT comes into player there followed by a “jade ring” and a long hall of ugly art.
Is this purely for atmosphere? I have found no way to refer to the body of the artist.
Heading farther in, there’s a bearskin rug in a “fur trapper” room, and two curious rooms dedicated to a “music student”.
The piano can be played (“IT IS VERY OUT OF TUNE”) but I haven’t otherwise been able to interact with either room past picking up the platinum record (a treasure). The iron panel to the northwest is particularly curious as it seems like it ought to be hiding another exit but again none of my verbs have been much use. Out of anywhere I’ve seen so far here I’d expect it to be a magical effect (playing some sort of instrument? … but not the piano, which can’t be moved).
Also near this route is a “white sand” room which can be dug into using the shovel, revealing a magazine. The magazine’s description is esoteric enough I think it might be intended to mirror the magazine in Crowther/Woods (which was intended for use with the “last lousy point”).
Moving on to the last area I’ve explored:
The most memorable room here (for me, in terms of description) is of a dead explorer in a corner with a crowbar. I have yet to find a use for the crowbar although PRY is a verb.
This is followed by a mostly linear sequence of rooms, although off one branch is a “wall of lava” which may or may not be traversable, and there’s two more fissures where you can jump to your death if you feel so inclined.
Following all the way down there’s a dead end and a pit. You can dig into the pit and find a tusk, which counts as another treasure.
I think this is the end of the line here.
That was a big chunk, so to summarize:
I have, gathering from above and below-ground, a CAN OF OIL, RUSTY SHOVEL, BRASS LAMP, HARD DISK, RUSTED PLIERS, SMALL PARACHUTE, SMALL METAL CROWBAR, and COMPASS. I now have a variety of treasures (including some GOLD DOUBLOONS in a CHEST I neglected to mention) and none seem like the sort of item to be used a puzzle; I should still test them for magical effects. (However, there’s no WAVE or other verb that would naturally seem to apply! Maybe everything is “realistic” barring the giant Venus flytrap.) As far as obstacles or at least rooms of interest go, there’s the just-mentioned Venus flytrap, the computer with generator, the furnace, a weirdly decorated corridor, some quicksand, a cold room with an icicle, and a couple places that can be jumped into (currently resulting in doom, but I need to test the parachute out more). I also should do another pass on the mansion as surely something like the picture will shake loose a secret.
The game’s manual implies this is a game about finding hidden things, perhaps more than overcoming outright blatant obstacles.
CRYSTAL CAVERNS is subtle, complex, and devious. Imagination and persistence are your most valuable tools. Pick up anything that looks vaguely useful. Move, dig under or open anything that appears suspicious…or rattles.
Daniel Kitchen published two adventure games in 1982 through Hayden Books. One of them, Crime Stopper (written with Barry Marx), I’ve already covered here. While I’ve discussed Hayden before, I haven’t really talked about Dan Kitchen himself. To do things properly I should discuss the whole trio of Kitchen brothers: Steve, Garry, and Dan. So before we start looking for caverns, let’s go back to the late 60s–
The Kitchen brothers lived in New Jersey with a father who loved electronics; enough supplies were lying around that Steve (the oldest) built a home-made computer from parts in the basement. Steve went on to work for Wickstead Design, an electronics design firm; Garry (the next oldest) followed. Garry had inclination more as an artist and
I had no engineering experience so I joined the company as low man on the totem pole, getting lunch for people, running errands and learning how to solder and build electronic prototypes.
He started attending college the same time with a major in art, but became engrossed enough in the electronics side he switched to electronics engineering in his sophomore year.
Wickstead as a company became interested in electronic games in 1977 due to the release of the mega-hit Mattel Football.
Wickstead bid on — and won — a project from Parker Brothers to develop the product Wildfire, an electronic pinball game. Wildfire was originally invented by Bob and Holly Doyle using a microcomputer but the Wickstead’s commission was to turn it into an inexpensive toy going for $7. While the Wickstead had software expertise they didn’t have hardware, so they hired a contractor for the code:
The engineers started working on the hardware while the software consultant (who had a full-time job) wrote code on paper by hand, dropping it off at our office in the evening. My task was to type his code into the microprocessor development system. As the deadline approached, we still did not have running software, though the contractor assured us that the program was almost complete. Finally, he came to our office one night announcing that he had the last hand-written sheets, which he gave them to me to type in the system. We programmed a chip with the program, plugged it into our circuit board and nothing happened. No lights, no sound, no flippers, no ball. He pronounced that he knew what was wrong (Eureka!), changed a few lines of code, and we tried again. Still nothing. This went on for hours and hours and then days and days and we began to wonder if this guy had any idea how to write software.
Garry ended up having to step in and learn how to code and Wildfire managed to be finished on schedule.
Dan followed his brothers to the company in 1979, and was also there while Garry designed his next product (Bank Shot), an electronic pool game which seemed like the next logical step after pinball.
Around this time the oldest brother (Steve) left for California, and Garry obtained an interest in the Atari 2600. He reverse-engineered the system, and using an Apple II, made the game Space Jockey as a test in 1980. (This game was eventually published in 1982, but that’s ahead of our story.)
A few months later, in the basement of Garry’s home, Dan and Garry founded a company: Imaginative Systems Software. They wanted to focus on the Apple II, but their first paying job (through Hayden) was a port of Reversal (an Othello clone) to the Atari 400. This led to a more lucrative contract after for six Apple II games, which ended up being Crystal Caverns, Crime Stopper, Laser Bounce, Bellhop, Shuttle Intercept and Kamikaze.
Dan had gotten an Apple II the same year he joined Wickstead (1979) and was able to help crank out the games in assembly language. He was a “big fan of Microsoft Adventure and all of Scott Adams’ games”, hence the text adventures. Crystal Caverns earned him $6000, and one of Garry’s friends (Barry Marx) came up with the concept and story for the follow-up game, Crime Stopper.
Crystal Caverns is more of a classical Crowther/Woods style romp. That’s not necessarily a bad thing; while the originality of Crime Stopper was refreshing, the complex series of events ended up breaking and not only was I unable to finish the game, the walkthrough I was using (via The Book of Adventure Games) only was able to trigger the ending on two out of six tries. A classical Treasure Hunt (find the valuable objects, drop them in the right room) is less likely to break.
CRYSTAL CAVERNS is an adventure game for the sleuth with an appetite for mystery, danger and buried treasure. Somewhere buried in a deserted old mansion lie treasures of priceless value. But to find them you must embark on a perilous journey riddled with pitfalls, dead ends, and deadly surprises.
In order to complete the adventure you must seek out the treasures hidden throughout the mansion and caverns below and stash them in just the right spot in the mansion.
While the Kitchen original was for Apple II a port was eventually made for Commodore 64. I am sticking with the original.
While the very original Apple II had only a very tiny amount of memory (4k) it tended to be expanded to 48k, that is, 3 times the capacity of a TRS-80. So while Dan Kitchen liked both Scott Adams and Adventure, the capabilities of the Apple meant he didn’t have to stick with super-minimalism, and in fact the start of the game has a bunch of rooms just for scenery which revels in long descriptions.
For example, heading straight north from the starting point leads to a vivid room description which could represent a hint of sorts but mostly is an opportunity to drop some long prose along the lines of the volcano room in Adventure.
It’s a nice contrast after playing a VIC-20 game! The starting outdoors map is the sort where the author is loathe to have some exits get blocked off (because why would they be blocked off outdoors?) but the general effect is a lot of confusing one-way exits:
I’m keeping my map with these in case the exits become important later (for optimizing moves, maybe) but here’s a simplified version:
The only important parts (so far) are a room with a “hard disk”, a parachute in a room with a message…
…and a path ending at an “odd shaped key”.
The stump in the screenshot looks like it might be important, but it has rebuffed my attempts to interact with it.
The key can then be taken to the front gate to unlock in, revealing the inner area by the mansion.
Most of this seems to be just meant to build atmosphere. In the environs you can scoop up a busted pair of pliers, as well as a can of oil and shovel from a shed.
The boarded up back door has a carving; I don’t know if it is intended to be busted through later (if so, probably from the other side).
The hint indicates you can knock at the front door.
From here the map gets fairly expansive so this is a good place to pause until I’ve got the lay of the land. Despite bog-standard gameplay I’m enjoying myself a little more than Crime Stoppers so far; I’m not being paranoid about a time limit or softlocking my game early and there’s no need to wait for a subway to pass. It’s less of a “regular story” but pure exploration still can hold my interest in games that put effort into their atmosphere.
Renga in Blue 