Kyocera Cavern Crawl
The earliest roguelike I ever played was Cavern Crawl, a roguelike inside my babysitter's Kyocera 2000-series cell phone.
I had babysitters much longer than most of my peers did, due to my Type 1 diabetes - even when I was 13 or so years old, my parents were unwilling to leave me alone out of fear I'd have a hypoglycemic episode. It wasn't until I'd spent more summers alone at a camp for kids with diabetes that they began to trust that I could take care of myself without oversight.
Sometime before 2004, my babysitter and I reached a detente where I'd be very passive and compliant... and she would let me play all the dumb little games on her candybar cell phone. I don't think I was allowed to have my own cell phone until 2005 or so, and the phone I ended up getting was a Nokia with much worse games.
Her Kyocera came with Cavern Crawl, a simple little roguelike. I found it completely gripping. I drained her battery multiple times trying to beat it one summer. I think I was 12 or so - I am pretty sure that my obsession with the game happened a little while before I began to feel deeply embarrassed about having a babysitter at all.
This reddit thread has been my best source of information over the years about Cavern Crawl. A few people who got their hands on these old phones have posted there about playing the game again. It also links to Dragonlord Enterprises, the website of the dev outsourcer/production lead who actually had the contract for making Cavern Crawl for Kyocera in the early 2000s.
The guy seems to be named John Meyers - I had to dig into one of his sub-websites to find his name. It's an incredible slice of Old Ass Internet:
About the Kyocera games, he says:
Multi-billion-dollar cell phone giant Kyocera used my company to OEM-develop practically all of the embedded games built into their at the factory shipping from 2001-2004. We created some of the first cell phone games in North America. I managed up to 6 projects at the same time. We had to consistently hit hard seasonal marketing deadlines. Kyocera went on to see an estimated $300,000,000 worth of product with our work in it.
There's nothing special or specific said here about Cavern Crawl in particular. However, his Youtube account has posted 3 videos of Cavern Crawl... and nothing else. If I had to guess, this game is probably the one that captured the most attention from people who are still involved in games and game development today.
Here's the gameplay video he posted:
I loved this shit when I was, like, 12. This was absolutely peak gaming, to me. It was special because it was on my babysitter's phone, and I didn't see her every day, and she had the power to take the game away from me. I could only play it when we had to drive places in the car. I think I might have come close to beating it one time, but I'm not sure I ever did.
I love reading other people talk about this game online because it's such an elusive piece of games software and nobody who seeks it can really get their hands on it unless they buy an old Kyocera. That's not hard - someone in the thread talks about buying an old phone for 20 bucks off of eBay just to play it. But it feels a bit like an extravagance, right? Last year I bought a copy of an old Othello handheld I used to play back when I was 11 or 12 years old, and that felt like an insane extravagance to me even though it also only cost me around 15 bucks. Some people who check in on that Reddit thread do have the phone, but they're strangely unwilling or unable to upload a lot of gameplay footage, so they're just posting the theme music for one another and stuff.
I was trying to figure out exactly which Kyoceras had this game on it, so of course I immediately went to The Mobile Phone Museum... and they definitely do not have a copy of the model I used. I hope this website someday has the resources to make their database searchable by software, too. It would be great to be able to filter this for certain installed games.
Anyway, that's all I have to say on this topic. Definitely check out the Dragonlord Enterprises website even if these old phone games aren't particularly interesting to you - it's incredible old school developer portfolio stuff.