You are running a 17 year old Debian? Letme guess. You obtained a second hand laptop or something like that ;-)
You can try the web version of the game. The developer links to one on the page. It is not on the index. If the game keeps crashing, maybe your hardware is as outdated as your operating system. Or other parts of the operating system are just too old.
It has been a while since I touched a Debian, but it was rather update friendly. But maybe you need to push it to the newer versions, as it tries to keep your system stable by not updating things like the kernel. If you recently aquired the device, you might want to try switching to a new linux distribution. If you are unfamiliar with linux, you might want to try one of the more user friendly distributions. Like Ubuntu. That is also a Debian, but with bells and whistles.