Development
Franz Lanzinger was the developer of Crystal Castles. Lanzinger had been programming on his own since 1971 and dropped out of a mathematics degree at the University of California in Berkeley to pursue a career in scientific research. Lanzinger was a fan of arcade games and when his friend Brian McGhie was hired by Atari as part of a testing group, Lanzinger was recommended to Atari by McGhie due to his proficiency in coding in assembly language, and was hired in 1982. It was the first game he ever developed. Lanzinger later thanked McGhee, including his initials "BBM" in a level in Crystal Castles.
Upon arrival at the company, Lanzinger had to choose from a book on approved projects and picked one titled Toporoids, a variation of Atari's Asteroids (1979). He was without a development system for his first month at Atari, leading him to spend the first few months working on a mainframe computer creating three-dimensional backgrounds as the intended topology of the game. He recalled he would make five or so variants of the backgrounds each day. As he developed them, he began experimenting with them, and created an E.T.-like character that would move along the architecture. He started to feel like he could make a very different game than Toporoids.
At this time, there was no theme or enemies in the game. Lanzinger and some co-workers began thinking of ideas for the game and developed a fairy tale theme such as moving trees and a witch from The Wizard of Oz (1939). The idea of Bentley Bear came from these sessions. The bear was initially named Bear Braveheart, which was changed by Atari's marketing team because they feared it would be offensive to Indigenous people. A competition was held among the engineering team to rename the character; Bentley was chosen.
Lanzinger was a fan of the games Centipede (1981) and Millipede (1982), which used a trackball to control the game, leading to him using one in Crystal Castles. Towards the end of development, Lanzinger said Atari management had strongly encouraged him to switch to a joystick control scheme. He recalled that this motion did not go forward as the game became much worse through joystick control as it was not designed for it. Lanzinger wrote all the code for the game. Two graphic artists employed by Atari contributed to the art, including Barbara Singh, who created the majority of the motion objects, and Susan McBride, who also added a few. Lanzinger described the gameplay as "really just 3D Pac-Man." Atari programmer Dave Ralston helped design additional mazes when prototypes were being placed in arcades. Originally, there were 12 mazes; Ralston helped design some of the more complicated ones for the later portion of the game.
While developing the game, he spent $2,000 as a tax write-off playing arcade games as research. He stated that it was important to be accustomed to arcade games, which helped him "make good decisions about game design, it pushed me in the right direction." Watching other people play games like Tempest (1981) and having to take long periods of time to get to the skill level they wanted to be at inspired Lanzinger to include warps. This let advanced players get to the more difficult stages early on and to keep game time low for more income on a coin-op. The secret of the warps is shown later in the game to alert players to them.
Crystal Castles for the Atari ST was programmed by Andromeda Software, a company based in Hungary.
