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Pitfall II: Lost Caverns
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Pitfall II: Lost Caverns
Pitfall II: Lost Caverns is a 1984 platform video game developed by David Crane and published by Activision for the Atari 2600. The player controls Pitfall Harry, who must explore the wilds of Peru to find the Raj diamond and rescue his niece Rhonda and their animal friend Quickclaw. The game world is populated by various enemies and hazards that variously cause the player to lose points and return to a checkpoint.
The game is a sequel to Pitfall! (1982), one of the best-selling Atari 2600 video games. Crane found that the Atari 2600 hardware was out of date when developing the sequel, which led to him creating a custom computer chip called the Display Processor Chip for Pitfall II: Lost Caverns. This allowed for more complex graphics and background music than its predecessor.
Pitfall II received positive reviews for its expanded gameplay, with reviewers finding it superior to Pitfall!. It became the top selling console game of the year and was ported to other consoles and home computers. Retrospective reviews have continued to be positive, with Retro Gamer listing it as the best game on the Atari 2600 and other critics noting its gameplay innovations, such as being among the first games to include a checkpoint system.
Pitfall II: Lost Caverns is a platform video game set in Machu Pichu, Peru. The player controls Pitfall Harry, whose goal is to find and rescue Quickclaw the cat as well as Harry's niece Rhonda, and to recover the Raj diamond.
Pitfall Harry moves left and right and can jump over and onto objects, climb up and down ladders, ascend via balloons and swim to seek treasure and achieve the game objectives. The player can additionally collect gold bars scattered throughout the playfield for more points.
Unlike the original Pitfall! video game, there is no swinging on vines and there are no timed levels. There is also no "classical" approach to the number of player lives Pitfall Harry has; accidentally falling or interacting with traps and enemies merely causes the player's score to diminish. The player can find red crosses across the ground that act as checkpoints; when the player is hit by an enemy, Pitfall Harry returns to the last checkpoint he located.
David Crane's previous game Pitfall! (1982) was a major success for Activision and became the company's best selling release at the time. It led to large amounts of merchandising including board games, jigsaw puzzles, and the cartoon show Saturday Supercade, episodes of which featured Pitfall Harry and new characters such as Harry's niece Rhonda and the cowardly mountain lion Quickclaw. These characters introduced on the television series would later appear in the sequel Pitfall II: Lost Caverns.
Crane stated he made the sequel to Pitfall! "at a time when the Atari 2600 should have been replaced by a new gaming system." He had training as an electronics engineer and felt that the Atari 2600 "needed a boost" and designed a custom computer chip called the Display Processor Chip that was unique to Pitfall II: Lost Caverns. The chip allowed for additional graphic capabilities for the Atari 2600 and a music circuit. The chip contained special indexing registers that reduced the processing time for graphics operation by over 40%. Crane spoke about the developing the game and its graphics for the Atari 2600 at the 1984 Winter Consumer Electronics Show, stating that he would "stack Pitfall II against software in any other computer under $10,000. I might be able to make the boulders look more like boulders [on any other machine], but I could not make the game any better."
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Pitfall II: Lost Caverns
Pitfall II: Lost Caverns is a 1984 platform video game developed by David Crane and published by Activision for the Atari 2600. The player controls Pitfall Harry, who must explore the wilds of Peru to find the Raj diamond and rescue his niece Rhonda and their animal friend Quickclaw. The game world is populated by various enemies and hazards that variously cause the player to lose points and return to a checkpoint.
The game is a sequel to Pitfall! (1982), one of the best-selling Atari 2600 video games. Crane found that the Atari 2600 hardware was out of date when developing the sequel, which led to him creating a custom computer chip called the Display Processor Chip for Pitfall II: Lost Caverns. This allowed for more complex graphics and background music than its predecessor.
Pitfall II received positive reviews for its expanded gameplay, with reviewers finding it superior to Pitfall!. It became the top selling console game of the year and was ported to other consoles and home computers. Retrospective reviews have continued to be positive, with Retro Gamer listing it as the best game on the Atari 2600 and other critics noting its gameplay innovations, such as being among the first games to include a checkpoint system.
Pitfall II: Lost Caverns is a platform video game set in Machu Pichu, Peru. The player controls Pitfall Harry, whose goal is to find and rescue Quickclaw the cat as well as Harry's niece Rhonda, and to recover the Raj diamond.
Pitfall Harry moves left and right and can jump over and onto objects, climb up and down ladders, ascend via balloons and swim to seek treasure and achieve the game objectives. The player can additionally collect gold bars scattered throughout the playfield for more points.
Unlike the original Pitfall! video game, there is no swinging on vines and there are no timed levels. There is also no "classical" approach to the number of player lives Pitfall Harry has; accidentally falling or interacting with traps and enemies merely causes the player's score to diminish. The player can find red crosses across the ground that act as checkpoints; when the player is hit by an enemy, Pitfall Harry returns to the last checkpoint he located.
David Crane's previous game Pitfall! (1982) was a major success for Activision and became the company's best selling release at the time. It led to large amounts of merchandising including board games, jigsaw puzzles, and the cartoon show Saturday Supercade, episodes of which featured Pitfall Harry and new characters such as Harry's niece Rhonda and the cowardly mountain lion Quickclaw. These characters introduced on the television series would later appear in the sequel Pitfall II: Lost Caverns.
Crane stated he made the sequel to Pitfall! "at a time when the Atari 2600 should have been replaced by a new gaming system." He had training as an electronics engineer and felt that the Atari 2600 "needed a boost" and designed a custom computer chip called the Display Processor Chip that was unique to Pitfall II: Lost Caverns. The chip allowed for additional graphic capabilities for the Atari 2600 and a music circuit. The chip contained special indexing registers that reduced the processing time for graphics operation by over 40%. Crane spoke about the developing the game and its graphics for the Atari 2600 at the 1984 Winter Consumer Electronics Show, stating that he would "stack Pitfall II against software in any other computer under $10,000. I might be able to make the boulders look more like boulders [on any other machine], but I could not make the game any better."