Ludography
Cavern Creatures cover

1983 · Arcade · Shoot 'em up

Cavern Creatures

The player controls a small craft, navigating it through a series of winding caverns and tunnels while shooting or avoiding obstacles. The caverns scroll from the bottom of the screen to the top at a fixed speed, so the player must always move forward.

Released
1983
Platforms
Apple II
Genres
ArcadeShoot 'em upShooter
Developers
—
Publishers
Datamost
Modes
Single-player
Perspective
Side view
Themes
ActionScience fiction
Country
United States
Languages
English

About

Cavern Creatures is a vertically scrolling shooter for the Apple II written by Paul Lowrance and published by Datamost in 1983. The title screen artwork is by Art Huff. The game is similar to the 1981 game Caverns of Mars for the Atari 8-bit computers.

Keywords

  • shoot 'em up

Media

The articlegameplay, story, development, reception

Gameplay

The player controls a small craft, navigating it through a series of winding caverns and tunnels while shooting or avoiding obstacles. The caverns scroll from the bottom of the screen to the top at a fixed speed, so the player must always move forward.

The obstacles filling the tunnels are mostly the eponymous "creatures" and appear as simple icons like smiley faces, floppy diskettes, birds, eyes, apples, bunches of grapes, Pac-Man ghosts, baseball hats, turrets, etc. Many of these objects are animated, but they do not actually move about. The player's craft fires bolts of energy simultaneously in three directions (left, right and forward) that destroy the creatures but consume the ship's energy, tracked by a green bar at the bottom of the screen. Energy is replenished by shooting occasional "tanks" on the tunnel walls.

Reception

Softline noted Cavern Creatures' resemblance to the Atari 8-bit game Caverns of Mars and called the graphics "top-notch" and "wonderful". The magazine concluded that it "combines the best action of maze games with the excitement and challenge of the arcade".

Computer Gaming World wrote, "This is a case of 'The box artwork has little to do with the game'. The 'creatures' in this game are an assortment of symbols...but not the green meany on the box cover," and also "The underground city looks nice, the game is so-so."

Releases by platformdates and regions as published

PlatformReleasedRegions
Apple II31 December 1983North America

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Collections1 collection

Platform libraries

Description adapted from its source, CC BY-SA 4.0.