Please login to submit a screenshot

The Making of Pitfall!
======================

Format: Atari 2600
Release: 1982
Publisher: Activision
Developer: David Crane

Pitfall Harry is stuck in the jungle. He’s racing through, swinging from vines, jumping on alligator heads, grabbing treasures and looking for shortcuts. For David Crane, the creator and programmer of Pitfall!, one of the first Activision games for the Atari 2600, the hardest part of the game wasn’t avoiding the scorpions or coiled snakes, it was trying to jam a lot of game into only 4K of memory.

“I loved the technical challenge of designing games on the 2600,” says Crane of Atari’s first console unit. He and his fellow game developers for the much-loved 2600 were more than aware of the restrictions they were dealing with. They would have to write an entire game, complete with graphics, gameplay, sound effects and all the scoring in just 4096 bytes. You could hardly let your imagination run wild with that kind of memory size. “A lot of the game features in those days were not what you could think of, but what you could actually achieve.” At that time, Crane’s complete design philosophy was to first think of a clever and original technical achievement and then to build a game around it.

“The ‘little running man’ was really the technical hurdle,” says Crane. “If you think back to the state-of-the-art videogames of the late-’70s, there were very few attempts at animated figures in games. You controlled tanks, jet planes, Pong paddles and so on because the limited number of display pixels severely restricted the creation of smooth animation. I had developed a realistic-looking human character in 1979 before I had a game idea that needed one. The difficulty was coming up with a game that made sense to have a little running man in it.” For three years, Crane tested the character in different scenarios such as a ‘cops and robbers’ game, but it didn’t work and was therefore shelved.

In 1982, while he was between games, Crane finally decided he would figure out a game for the ‘little running man.’ “I sat down with a blank sheet of paper and drew a stick figure in the centre. I said, ‘Okay, I have a little running man and let’s put him on a path’ (two more lines drawn on the paper). ‘Where is the path? Let’s put it in a jungle’ (draw some trees). ‘Why is he running?’ (draw treasures to collect, enemies to avoid and so on). And Pitfall! was born.” The man became known as Pitfall Harry. “This entire process took about ten minutes. About 1,000 hours of programming later, the game was complete. In that era we said we spent 90 per cent of our time writing the last ten per cent of the game.”

It’s no surprise that the film Raiders of the Lost Ark, which was released in 1981, influenced the design of Pitfall!, and there was another apparent nod to Tarzan with the presence of the swinging vines. But not so obvious were the introductions of the alligators. “I remembered from deep in my childhood a pair of cartoon characters (Magpies) called Heckle and Jekyll. They had a sequence during which they would run across the heads of alligators, barely escaping the jaws. I thought that would make for an interesting sequence in the game.”



Leaping across alligator heads turned out to be Crane’s favourite aspect of the game. “The first time you crossed the alligators you did so by carefully waiting for the mouths to close, jumping onto the closed mouth, tapping the joystick to move over to stand on the forehead, and waiting until the mouth opened and closed again before moving on. But once you got really good you could sail non-stop across them by exactly aiming your landing to hit the forehead of the first alligator and immediately jumping again to the next one.”

Creating this enjoyable sequence in the game required a small programming tweak. In the original design, to jump from one alligator head to the other the player had to move the joystick and jump at exactly the same time. “This proved to be almost impossible to play. So I changed the code to allow you to direct Harry’s jump to the side, if you moved the joystick within a small instant from the time you pressed the button to jump. From a programming standpoint this was a tiny change, but it changed the gameplay from nearly impossible to an easily learned skill.” It was this design decision, and many others influenced by other programmers, that made Activision games such as Pitfall! so much fun. “It was all in the tiny details,” says Crane.

“The world of Pitfall Harry is a circular path 254 screens in circumference. The game ROM contains only 4Kb of memory, so there isn’t enough memory to hold both Harry’s graphic frames and the definitions for 254 screens. I solved this problem on Pitfall! by creating an algorithm that defined every screen mathematically. The actual definition of the entire world took less than 50 bytes of ROM.”

Format: Atari 2600
Release: 1982
Publisher: Activision
Developer: David Crane

Pitfall Harry is stuck in the jungle. He’s racing through, swinging from vines, jumping on alligator heads, grabbing treasures and looking for shortcuts. For David Crane, the creator and programmer of Pitfall!, one of the first Activision games for the Atari 2600, the hardest part of the game wasn’t avoiding the scorpions or coiled snakes, it was trying to jam a lot of game into only 4K of memory.

“I loved the technical challenge of designing games on the 2600,” says Crane of Atari’s first console unit. He and his fellow game developers for the much-loved 2600 were more than aware of the restrictions they were dealing with. They would have to write an entire game, complete with graphics, gameplay, sound effects and all the scoring in just 4096 bytes. You could hardly let your imagination run wild with that kind of memory size. “A lot of the game features in those days were not what you could think of, but what you could actually achieve.” At that time, Crane’s complete design philosophy was to first think of a clever and original technical achievement and then to build a game around it.

“The ‘little running man’ was really the technical hurdle,” says Crane. “If you think back to the state-of-the-art videogames of the late-’70s, there were very few attempts at animated figures in games. You controlled tanks, jet planes, Pong paddles and so on because the limited number of display pixels severely restricted the creation of smooth animation. I had developed a realistic-looking human character in 1979 before I had a game idea that needed one. The difficulty was coming up with a game that made sense to have a little running man in it.” For three years, Crane tested the character in different scenarios such as a ‘cops and robbers’ game, but it didn’t work and was therefore shelved.

In 1982, while he was between games, Crane finally decided he would figure out a game for the ‘little running man.’ “I sat down with a blank sheet of paper and drew a stick figure in the centre. I said, ‘Okay, I have a little running man and let’s put him on a path’ (two more lines drawn on the paper). ‘Where is the path? Let’s put it in a jungle’ (draw some trees). ‘Why is he running?’ (draw treasures to collect, enemies to avoid and so on). And Pitfall! was born.” The man became known as Pitfall Harry. “This entire process took about ten minutes. About 1,000 hours of programming later, the game was complete. In that era we said we spent 90 per cent of our time writing the last ten per cent of the game.”

It’s no surprise that the film Raiders of the Lost Ark, which was released in 1981, influenced the design of Pitfall!, and there was another apparent nod to Tarzan with the presence of the swinging vines. But not so obvious were the introductions of the alligators. “I remembered from deep in my childhood a pair of cartoon characters (Magpies) called Heckle and Jekyll. They had a sequence during which they would run across the heads of alligators, barely escaping the jaws. I thought that would make for an interesting sequence in the game.”



Leaping across alligator heads turned out to be Crane’s favourite aspect of the game. “The first time you crossed the alligators you did so by carefully waiting for the mouths to close, jumping onto the closed mouth, tapping the joystick to move over to stand on the forehead, and waiting until the mouth opened and closed again before moving on. But once you got really good you could sail non-stop across them by exactly aiming your landing to hit the forehead of the first alligator and immediately jumping again to the next one.”

Creating this enjoyable sequence in the game required a small programming tweak. In the original design, to jump from one alligator head to the other the player had to move the joystick and jump at exactly the same time. “This proved to be almost impossible to play. So I changed the code to allow you to direct Harry’s jump to the side, if you moved the joystick within a small instant from the time you pressed the button to jump. From a programming standpoint this was a tiny change, but it changed the gameplay from nearly impossible to an easily learned skill.” It was this design decision, and many others influenced by other programmers, that made Activision games such as Pitfall! so much fun. “It was all in the tiny details,” says Crane.

“The world of Pitfall Harry is a circular path 254 screens in circumference. The game ROM contains only 4Kb of memory, so there isn’t enough memory to hold both Harry’s graphic frames and the definitions for 254 screens. I solved this problem on Pitfall! by creating an algorithm that defined every screen mathematically. The actual definition of the entire world took less than 50 bytes of ROM.”

The subterranean path dramatically changed gameplay and it worked as a shortcut. You would travel three screens underground for every one screen above ground. But the shortcuts weren’t without risk as Pitfall!’s subterranean world was littered with scorpions. Crane liked the split between the two worlds so much that he forced the player to go below ground to collect all the treasures. “It’s this kind of tweaking that raises a game from mediocrity,” he says.

Cram too much action into a 2600 game and characters start to flicker. It was often the case when an arcade game was translated for home use. For example, Pac-Man has five objects – four ghosts and one Pac-Man. The 2600 could only display two objects. Such a forced conversion to the 2600 guaranteed flicker.



During the early days of Activision all their games were original concepts, not home versions of arcade games. Developers were not forced into situations where they had to create a certain type of game to fit within the 2600’s fixed platform. By not forcing themselves into a corner early on, Activision games didn’t appear short of expectations (that is, no flicker). “If you design a game to work within the limitations of a severely limited machine, you’re going to make a game where people don’t realise how limited the machine is,” says Crane.

To create enemies, Crane played a gentle balance between what could be drawn by the machine and visually interpreted by the player. Drawing characters on a piece of paper, objects went in if they were easily recognisable and didn’t eat up too much memory. For example, Crane successfully drew a coiled snake, but wouldn’t even attempt a whirlpool. It would be far too complicated. “Each thing you see in there was the result of a lot of work to determine whether or not people could tell what it was when you put it in the game. There was a lot of trial and error.”

In 1979, Crane and some fellow programmers left Atari to create their own company, Activision. They wanted to continue designing games for the 2600, but were tired of the lack of credit Atari gave its programmers. Activision decided that its sales model for games would be like that of book sales and so they marketed both the title and the author. Each game included the name and a photo of the designer. If gamers liked a particular developer’s game they would eagerly seek out the next game he created.



The model proved successful. Crane became one of the first game programming superstars. Pitfall! clubs, thousands of members strong, sprung up everywhere. The game sold $50m (£31.2m) wholesale, received thousands of fan mail, and was game of the year in ’82, spending 64 weeks on the Billboard charts as the number one selling game. The game spawned a sequel and a Saturday morning animated series and in both 1983 and 1984, Crane was named Designer of the Year by the American magazines Video Game Update, Video Review and Computer Entertainer.

Thirty years of game programming and 60 games later, Crane still can’t stop. In 1995, Crane co-founded Skyworks Technologies, a company that creates advergames, marketing websites that use sponsored videogames to pass along an advertising message. Instead of looking to the new consoles which required 10–20 people and one or two years to develop a game, “We came to view the internet as the latest videogame system, and with limited bandwidth this new ‘game system’ is more like the systems of the past.” As chief technical officer of Skyworks, he still loves his work, and consumes himself with whatever project he has, sometimes working 18 hours in a given day. Whenever Crane is asked to pinpoint his favourite game, he always responds, “It’s the one I’m working on right now.”

This is an edited version of an article that originally appeared in E129.

Like what you’ve read? Buy a copy of our latest issue now for £4.50 and get it delivered to your door (UK and Europe only).