How to play Kyphus online
- Move your character: arrow keys
- Start the game: F12 (the console’s Reset switch)
- Save and load your progress: Ctrl + 0–9 saves to a slot, Alt + 0–9 loads it
What you can do in the prototype
You guide a small, stocky figure through a maze of rooms drawn in a pseudo-3D perspective. A glowing cloud that fires lasers floats around, and a multi-coloured robot follows you. The maze has 64 rooms, each in its own colour, with exits on the sides and at the top and bottom.
Be prepared: this build has no collision detection, so neither the cloud nor the robot can hurt you, and there is almost no sound. In practice you can only wander from room to room. The odd letters and numbers in the score and lives counters are debugging values the programmer used during development. They show your position, a countdown timer and the room number.
The story behind Kyphus
Apollo was a small Texas publisher known for unusual games such as Lost Luggage and Wabbit. Kyphus was listed in some of its advertisements, which showed a box picture of a wizard fighting evil clouds in a temple. The game code holds a few clues about the plans: the words Protect, Destroy and Invoke, probably commands you would have given the robot, and graphics of a large monkey that may have replaced the robot. The final goal of the game is unknown. Apollo went bankrupt in 1983 during the video game crash, and Kyphus was never completed.
