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Pitfall: A Classic Game Postmortem

Pitfall: A Classic Game Postmortem on HackerTube: recommended by 2 Hacker News commenters across 2 separate months, 2021–2024.

GDC Festival of Gaming

talk · intermediate · evergreen

Open on YouTube

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.

Why Hacker News recommends it

Recommended as an entertaining, technical look at squeezing a game into a tiny Atari 2600, told by the original developer.

people recommended it
2
separate months
2
strong recommendations
1
discussed on HN
2021–2024
“I'm linking at the relevant timestamp, but the whole video is pure Atari 2600 goodness.”
— netmare, Apr 2024, in “Inside the Super Nintendo cartridges”

What HN commenters said

3 Hacker News comments link this video. Each one links back to its thread.

netmareApr 2024Strongly recommends

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

in “Inside the Super Nintendo cartridges” · View on HN

canthonytucciMay 2021Recommends

▶ 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.

in “How Atari 2600 Game Pitfall Builds Its World” · View on HN

asgeirNov 2021Cites it

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

in “In C, how do you know if the dynamic allocation succeeded?” · View on HN

Topics & tags

Game history & retro gamingGame programming & enginesGame designpitfallgdcretro gamespostmortemgame programming