Atari 8-bit: Creepy Caverns

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Published on November 5, 2021 12:10:50 PM ● Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QwdY9g87USg

Duration: 10:03

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This is one of those games I kept coming back to. At least, when I had the patience for it to load from the cassette we had it saved on. Those things had relatively good storage capacity but were notoriously slow, and I think I remember the tape drive being rather finicky about whether it would work at all.

Anyway. Although I don't think the term existed at the time, Creepy Caverns is what we would now call an indie game. 16-year-old Anthony Ramos coded it in Atari BASIC on an Atari 400 he bought with money from a summer job, and the August 1984 issue of Antic magazine featured it as Game of the Month. You get five lives to work with, and your overall objective is to collect a sword, amulet, and some arrows to defeat the fearsome Megawump (presumably named after the monster in Hunt the Wumpus), while optionally gathering gold and gems and slaying lesser monsters to beef up your score. The Megawump won't appear until you have the sword, and the sword isn't useful for anything else, so consider holding off on getting it until you're ready for the final confrontation!

The real draw of the game, though, is that it randomly generates a new dungeon layout with each playthrough. The dungeon has a 6x6 layout of rooms, and when starting a new game, the program places walls at random between some of the rooms to generate a layout. The locations of the amulet, key, chest, Megawump, and your own starting location are randomly chosen. Each room has a random coloration, two monsters (except the Megawump's room), and a random amount of gold and gems (0 to 7 of each). Each row of rooms has one quiver of arrows in a randomly-chosen room, with the rows alternating between dumb and smart arrows.

The random generation in this game is usually effective, but fairly primitive. Only four checks are performed on the result: You can't start too close to the Megawump's room, the chest and key can't be in the same room, the amulet can't be in the Megawump's room, and the chest can't be in the Megawump's room. Anything that doesn't break those conditions will be accepted. All rooms start out interconnected, so it's uncommon to end up with an unwinnable game, but it happens. Once, I even got a layout where the starting room only connected to three others, and the other 32 rooms were out of reach!

There are other versions and revisions of the game floating around out there. One that seems to be official (possibly distributed on diskettes from Antic?) has a few digitized voice lines ("you will die" when starting a game, "get the bloody key" when entering the room with the key, and so on). Fan-made enhancements include things like enabling a map once you have the amulet. There was evidently enough interest in the game to result in that sort of thing, and the open-source nature of it made it easy enough to modify for anyone so inclined.

Speaking of which, I once analyzed the code and tried to make a port of it myself, though I never got around to adding the sound effects or implementing the Megawump encounter... You can see a demonstration of what I got working in the second half of this video: https://youtu.be/Q2AYO1SuQqM

More information: https://www.atarimagazines.com/v3n4/creepy.html