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Interview With Pitfall! Creator, David Crane
Bill Kendrick writes "Good Deal Games recently interviewed David Crane, creator of 1982's Game of the Year, 'Pitfall!' (as well as many other titles for the Atari 2600 and other systems). Topics include the 1000s of fan letters Activision received every week, the firing of Bill Gates, and how tennis helped bring Activision together."
shockwave version of pitfall
http://www.langleycreations.com/pitfall/
To recall the greatest feat (if indeed you can associate great feats with video games :) involving this game.
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=00/12/19/235023 4&mode=thread&tid=127
"The saddest words of mice and men, are not those which were, but should have been."
I like the last question, it has a good point!
- MT> You been quoted as stating, "man will always use his most advanced technology to amuse himself." Care to elaborate?
Most advanced tech used for amusement... yeah, that fits. Just off-the-cuff I can think of a bunch of examples:DC> Quotes are a funny thing - there are as many attributed to me that I didn't say as there are things I said many times that are easily forgotten. The best line I didn't say was, "It's a jungle in there!" referring to Pitfall! But the quote you mention has been referred to as "Crane's Law", and I firmly believe it.
(Snip the part about electric model airplanes)
- Gamers driving the high-end PC market
- Doom 3
- $400 GeForce/Radeon/Parhelia graphics cards
- Any sports car from Ferarri/Porsche/Mercedes/BMW/Audi/Acura/Lexus/you
r favoritebrandhere
- Insanely huge home theater installations
- Should I even point out that the porn industry was the first to release material using the advanced features of DVD? Or that they drove the adoption of videocassettes?
I'm sure other people can come up with even more examples.(For that matter, look at street racers putting Acura VTEC engines in their Honda Civics!)
"...America's great minds of today, teaching America's great minds of tomorrow. Poor bastards." -- A Beautiful Min
He helped start a company that took work-for-hire, no-credit-getting designers and gave them the credit they deserved...
And he later formed a company where he basically does games for corporations in a work-for-hire type situation. His name isn't even mentioned in the "about us" section of his company website.
Not that I lose any respect for him - I'm no elitist, anti-corporate type. Just figured his name would be on the website...
Robots are everywhere, and they eat old people's medicine for fuel.
Anyhow, if you've never seen it, check out this music video inspired by various Atari games (including Pitfall!).
"They do not preach that their god will rouse them, a little before the Nuts work loose." Kipling, 'The Sons of Martha'
3dfx (you still remember them right?) had a series of ads along these lines a few years ago. They were patterned after those pharmaceutical company ads about how their technology is bettering the planet. Transcript from one:
[file footage of children running through grassy fields, etc.]
What could we do with a chip that performs a hundred billion operations per second? Why, we could bolster the world's food supply. We could use our chip to genetically engineer juicier fruits. Hardy, mineral-rich vegetables. Tastier greens. And tender, all-white-meat chickens. We could use our technology to feed the world.
But then we thought -- hey, we could use it for games!
[All the food disappears from people's plates, and the camera pans to screenshots of games]
3dfx PC accelerators -- so powerful, it's kinda ricidulous.
And from another:
[File footage of doctors and old people and such]
We have in our possession a chip -- a chip that could revolutionize medicine as we know it. By performing a hundred billion operations a second, this chip could help us heal across continents. We could touch more lives, help people live longer than ever, and give us all more time to cherish the journey's truest rewards.
But then we thought -- hey, let's use it for games!
[The life-support equipment stops working and everyone dies, pan to screenshots of games]
3dfx PC accelerators -- so powerful, it's kinda ridiculous.
[Doctor from the earlier file footage shots says "you know, that game's a little violent for my tastes"]
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Pitfall! was defiantely a classic, howver I think it was Pitfall II for the atari 2600 that was truely groundbreaking and possibly the best game ever made for that system. It definately foreshadowed the side scrolling adventure games of the NES and Sega master system. If I'm not mistaken, it actually had a slightly different chipset than the standard 2600 game. Definately worth checking out on an emulator if you didn't catch it the first time around.
The easter egg was well known, actually. There was a secret item in the black castle's dungeon (you know, where you couldn't see anything except right around you). It was a 1x1 pixel dot. Oh... and it was invisible. AND, it was inside a little area that you couldn't get to without the bridge. (And since it was dark in that room, you'd almost never notice there was a little blocked-off area.)
:)
Well, get the dot... and guess what? NOW you have to CARRY it (remember, it's invisible) to a particular part of the world... near the gold castle, I believe. It was a room with a vertical line for a wall, instead of a solid wall on the side. You need to have a few additional items in that room, so that the vertical wall would kinda flicker some (too many sprites on the screen).
After doing all this, you now carry the dot (I think) THROUGH the wall, and you'll see the name of the author on the screen.
Pretty cool.