As well as inspiring its developer David Crane to make a sequel, the phenomenally successful Pitfall! also influenced his subsequent platform games. David explains how they evolved and distinguished themselves from his classic Atari 2600 adventure
Prior to the release of Pitfall! in 1982, the vast majority – if not all platform games – had been linear and level-based. David Crane’s platformer, by comparison, was set in a sprawling jungle environment, and as David explains, it really pushed the humble Atari 2600. “Pitfall! was built from the ground up using my newlycreated human figure – once I finally
achieved a recognisable character using just eight bits,” David sighs. “Then while dreaming up the game I placed the character running on a path, and it was only natural to place that path in a jungle. I didn’t set out to make a jungle adventure, but an adventure game, which ended up in a jungle because it provided an appropriate setting. Raiders Of The Lost Ark had been in theatres, so the idea of setting Pitfall! in a jungle was partially inspired by that.”
With a hero and setting in place, David next populated his platform game with pairs of hazards, carefully gauging their overall threat to test players without frustrating them. “It was important to tweak each interaction to be fun,” David reasons. “You never had to deal with rolling logs while trying to jump the alligators, for example. But it was not unusual to have rolling logs on paths with holes, so you had to be careful where you stood for your jump. Each interaction was such that once a player reached a certain level of skill they would be able to beat them. So players were first introduced to the alligators with a swinging vine, and only later did they encounter them without a vine.” Having based Pitfall!’s core objectives around survival – and ultimately escape, David next gave players a sidequest, which involved finding gold bars to boost their score. “In those days we played games for points,” David reflects, “and collecting treasure was the only way to earn points. My recollection is that there were 32 treasures, but that was plenty, as it gave me the depth of gameplay I wanted.”
Further efforts to broaden Pitfall!’s scope followed, as David doubled the size of his adventure by locating scorpion-filled cave systems beneath its jungle trails. “To expand the gameplay, I added an underground path,” David remembers, “and I turned that path into a shortcut – travelling underground traversed the jungle at triple speed, advancing a single underground screen at the speed of three above-ground screens. But any advantage came with a cost. The scorpions required a higher level of skill to jump, so the player had to master that skill to use the shortcut.”
The layers of gameplay in David’s platformer were duly noted on its release – Pitfall! was lauded by critics and sold in its millions. A year later, David designed an in-cartridge chip to support a bigger, better looking sequel with four-channel music. “Pitfall II added multiple levels of depth to the caverns rather than the
single underground level in Pitfall!,” David says of his follow-up’s grander scale. “The game led Pitfall Harry deep into the caverns, despite the fact that his final goal laid just beyond his reach – one level below his feet. So by design, the player had to investigate and collect treasure in the lowest levels before heading back up, allowing for additional depth of gameplay – pun intended!”
In order to further differentiate Pitfall II from its predecessor, David gave its hero a way to float up through its caves, although it didn’t quite fit the sequel’s storyline. “Ironically, I was never directly asked ‘Where do helium-filled balloons come from in the deepest, darkest levels of an underground cavern?’” David says wryly. “The answer would have been ‘Because it’s a videogame!’. Quite often when designing for the Atari 2600 we would add objects just because we could make them look good in 8 bits of graphics. Well the balloon looked really nice, and playing a circus-like song while riding the balloon let me show off the polyphonic musical hardware in my DPC chip.”
Another of Pitfall II’S innovations came in the form of flooded caves, which David populated with electric eels and bookended with waterfalls. “I added the river because I could,” David beams.
“It was pretty, and it gave Pitfall II a greater distinction from the original. In addition,
I put a waterfall – a one-way obstacle – into the river to force Harry to go deeper into the caverns. As for adding more challenges, water-based or otherwise, I was quite happy with the gameplay. A designer has to be able to judge when a game has enough content. Otherwise a design can go on for years and never be enjoyed by the public.”
Once finished, the public certainly enjoyed Pitfall II, so much so that it topped the US sales charts. However, David decided against a third game, and five years passed before his next platformer, a NES title that he developed with Garry Kitchen. “A Boy And His Blob belonged to a different genre from Pitfall! and Pitfall II,” David argues,
“it was a ‘tool-using adventure’ that happened to be set in a platform game world. But I didn’t like the idea of breaking the story-flow to pause the game and pull up an inventory screen, select a tool or weapon, and return to the game. The inspiration to use a buddy character – who happened to be a shape-changing alien blob – solved that issue for me.”
Unlike Pitfall!, the levels in David and Garry’s platformer just had platforms and hazards, thanks to its shape-shifting alien Blobert, because if you needed a ladder, for example, you just turned him into a ladder by feeding him a specific jellybean. “Having the blob go through animating transformations was both very innovative and visually attractive,” David enthuses. “Next came the creation of a world design that presented challenges that you could only overcome with Blobert’s help, and bags of jellybeans scattered around to discover and use.”
In an effort to give their platformer greater depth, David and Garry added shoot-’em-up elements to its later stages, but otherwise their game took inspiration from one of
“Raiders Of The Lost Ark had been in theatres, so the idea of setting Pitfall! in a jungle was partially inspired by that ” DAVID CRANE
David’s earlier triumphs. “We decided to design the game in two ‘acts’ that each took place in different environments,” David explains. “The first was a two-dimensional underground cavern as a homage to Pitfall
II, but for the second we wanted something completely different, and Garry settled on a rapid-fire shooter. Either ‘act’ might have been enough for a NES game, but the two together would be dynamite.”
With the majority of A Boy And His Blob channelling David’s Pitfall! follow-up, underwater sections were an obvious addition to the NES project, although unlike those in Pitfall II they were free of electric eels and there was no swimming required. “The gameplay in the caverns required the use of tools – namely Blobert, so it only made sense for the boy to navigate the underwater sections of the game not by swimming but by figuring out how to use the blob,” David explains. “Spoiler alert: you could breathe inside a giant cola bubble, and while riding underwater inside it you had to combat buoyancy and currents, and get to treasures without popping the bubble on sharp rocks. Adding enemies might have been nice, but they were not necessary.” Of course, there was also the NES platformer’s second stage, which David and Garry set on a fictional planet where hazards had to be blasted with a ‘Vitablaster’ that fired vitamins bought with treasure from the game’s earlier cavern level. “After we created the fantasy backstory it was a simple matter to have the boy take his collected treasure on Earth to the health food store, buy vitamins and rocket off to Blobolonia to save the vitamin-depleted planet,” David recalls. “Although I should note that neither Garry nor I are recreational drug users, regardless of how the story of Blobolonia might sound!” In fact, recreational drug use was the very last thing David and Garry wanted A Boy
And His Blob to promote, especially given its target audience. “Early testing showed us that the game was likely to skew toward younger players – largely due to the cute backstory, I suppose,” David contemplates, “so Garry and I tweaked the availability of jellybeans to keep younger players involved. If we had been designing for more hardcore players we could have tweaked the jellybean supply to make the game far more challenging.”
“Pitfall II added multiple levels of depth to the caverns rather than the single underground level in Pitfall! ” DAVID CRANE
As it turned out, the wholesome story of a boy with a blob who shot vitamins rather than bullets went down extremely well with players and parents alike. So much so, that David moved straight onto designing a Game Boy follow-up. “Rescue Of Princess Blobette was an entirely original game, as opposed to a Game Boy port of the original,” David notes. “To me that meant I should create some new and different blob transformations, with new and different associated interactions. The combination of the screen size and the memory configuration I was designing to also made it possible to animate some backgrounds. I believe the first idea I had was turning Blobert into a monkey wrench in order to ‘throw a monkey wrench into the machinery’. That led to creating animated machines that gave the player other challenges to figure out.” As well as its animated machines, David’s handheld platformer further distinguished itself from its NES counterpart by making its treasure hunt a less essential part of its core gameplay. “Most games had a numerical score – and Blobette had that,” David considers. “I learned from Pitfall! that people were interested in how many treasures they had collected – and Blobette showed that. Blobette required more puzzle solving, including the collection of a number of coins that opened a treasure vault once all were collected, so I wouldn’t describe the treasure collection as optional. It was mandatory for the player who wanted to ‘beat’ the game. That said, you could play Blobette in a number of different ways.”
A second major differentiation from A Boy And His Blob followed, as David added puzzles to his Game Boy follow-up that had solutions that didn’t require the blob. “Rather than making the blob redundant, these additions made the jellybeans more relevant,” David
“Every game is built on different foundations. Bart Simpson would never go unarmed into a jungle” DAVID CRANE
observes. “A player who had used the blob for many other tasks would initially be stumped trying to collect certain treasures. The only way to collect one diamond, for example, was to douse one of the torches – something the blob could not do. So what a wonderful discovery when you found out that the ‘cool mint’ jellybean put out the fire.”
Although Rescue Of Princess Blobette reviewed well when it came out,
David didn’t continue his Blob franchise. But the next year he worked on another Game Boy platformer, with a less heroic, less virtuous protagonist than his Blob or Pitfall titles. “Every game is built on different foundations,” David points out. “Bart Simpson would never go unarmed into a jungle in the way that Pitfall Harry did, and he would more likely use the blob in far less acceptable ways than as simple ladders and bridges. Likewise, he would go to summer camp armed with adolescent weapons. The spitballs and boomerangs were appropriate options, and each had its own effect in the game.”
Like he had done with A Boy And His Blob, David opted to complement the platforming in his Simpsons platformer – Escape From Camp Deadly – with some pure shoot’em-up interludes. “I wanted to give Camp Deadly more twitch gameplay than passive adventuring, and my favourite section was the food fight,” David beams. “Having to turn around to throw food at your pursuers – losing ground to them to do so – was a delicious trade off between speed and strategy. I tweaked the heck out of the timing until it became one of my favourite scenes in any of the games I published.”
On its release, some reviewers loved Camp Deadly’s intense platforming while others found it rather unforgiving. Three years later, David co-designed a licensed SNES platformer called Home Improvement: Power Tool Pursuit, and unlike Pitfall!, finding its treasures was essential. “Home Improvement: Power Tool Pursuit was a game from the mid-nineties, after tens of thousands of games had been created, including many games of that type,” David muses, “so unlike the Seventies, where
the hardware barely allowed us to display a score, many different scoring metrics could be added, and so different players could have different goals when playing.”
As with David’s Pitfall titles, Power Tool Pursuit started off in a jungle with a cave system. It featured hanging vines too, but its hero favoured swinging around on a rope and grappling hook. “Ten or fifteen artists, animators, programmers and layout designers created the backgrounds, weapons, player physics and animations to show the player in action,” David recollects, “and we put them all together over time. While developing the game, someone came up with a tool that provided a grappling hook effect, and it worked well in the context of the game – it was as simple as that.”
Like he had with A Boy And His Blob and Camp Deadly, David armed Power Tool
Pursuit ’s protagonist, more specifically with power tools acquired by beating bosses.
David puts these mechanics down to an organic process with corporate oversight.
“The weapons that didn’t make sense were discarded, the world layouts were tweaked and the boss monsters evolved,” David reviews. “It all seemed to work well at the time, and that was a style of game that the studio could understand, and thus the style of game that they approved.” In keeping with Camp Deadly, Power Tool Pursuit split the critics, and David hasn’t made another platform game since, but when the still-active developer is asked if he might follow-up his most famous platformer
Pitfall! it’s obvious that he’s full of ideas. “I have no driving need to follow-up Pitfall II with a sequel, nor could I if I wanted to, since
Pitfall! and Pitfall Harry are owned by today’s Activision,” David makes clear. “But a David Crane game on a modern console would probably be a side view, 2.5D scrolling game with multiple depths to the background. There would be a number of different environments, and there would certainly be something fun to do. What is fun? Even after nearly 100 published games, that is still something that I can only say ‘I will know it when I see it.’”