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Pitfall: A Classic Game Postmortem

GDC Festival of Gaming · 62.6K views · 2016-07-21 · 1:00:34

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Overview

David Crane's 2011 GDC postmortem of Pitfall, the classic Atari 2600 game. He explains how he created the game under the severe hardware limits of the console.

On Hacker News

Recommended as an entertaining, technical look at squeezing a game into a tiny Atari 2600, told by the original developer.

Recommended by 2 HN people across 2 months · HN mentions 2021–2024

Topics

Game history & retro gamingGame programming & enginesGame design
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What people said

netmare · 2024-04 · Strong recommendation

David Crane, the creator of Pitfall, explains it all very nicely in a GDC Classic Game Postmortem [1]. I'm linking at the relevant timestamp, but the whole video is pure Atari 2600 goodness. The full Postmortems playlist is quite enjoyable too. I particularly liked the talks about the original Deus Ex, Myst, Loom, Adventure, Marble Madness, Ms. Pac-Man, Paperboy, Lemmings, and more. I find these videos very soothing and nostalgic. Got to rewatch them now... [1]: [VIDEO]

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canthonytucci · 2021-05 · Recommendation

[VIDEO] the GDC post-mortem of pitfall has some more info, and I found it pretty entertaining. I think the whole series is worth watching if you like this sort of stuff.

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asgeir · 2021-11 · Reference

You can find a number of technical deep-dives for classic video game consoles where people have had do deal with very limited resources. This video springs to mind as one example: [VIDEO]

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Sources

Video by GDC Festival of Gaming, played through YouTube.

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