The game was designed by Roberta Williams and was the first Hi-Res Adventure directly released under the SierraVenture label in 1983.

An alternate version of the game intended for younger players called Gelfling Adventure was released in 1984.

[5] The game received a Certificate of Merit in the category of "1984 Best Computer Adventure" at the 5th annual Arkie Awards.

[7] In a 1983 review of the Atari 8-bit version for Hi-Res magazine, Mark S. Murley found the game too clearly linear and disliked having to swap between three disks.

He wrote: If the narrowness of the game and the disk-swapping problem were the only negative aspects of The Dark Crystal, then I might be tempted to at least recommend it, however, to novice Adventurers.