Pitfall: A Classic Game Postmortem
GDC Festival of Gaming2 HN recommenders · recommended in 2 months, 2021-2024
63K views · 10 years ago · talk · evergreen
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.
Recommended as an entertaining, technical look at squeezing a game into a tiny Atari 2600, told by the original developer.
1:00:12Pitfall Classic Postmortem With David Crane Panel at GDC 2011 (Atari 2600)
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3 comments from Hacker News
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]: ▶ this video
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: ▶ this video
▶ this 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.