If you are around my age, and I suspect that some of you are; you were around when the 2600 was released and while those games look really stupid by today's standards, they were all the rage back in the day. I remember relishing going to Richman Gordman's (this was a reasonably successful midwestern departments store that i THINK has gone completely out of business) and they would have a series of televisions right next to the entrance that were displaying 3 games that you could try out. My mom would just drop me off there and go get her shopping done and come back for me an hour or so later.
Anyway, that bit of childhood nostalgia aside, there were a few standout games on the 2600 that everyone remembers and Pitfall was one of them.
Just look at this mess. This is what we considered cutting edge entertainment at the time. You moved to the right or the left in what appeared to be a never-ending series of screens that might be randomly generated, I really have no idea. I read somewhere that the game actually did have an ending, but the game would simply freeze if you ever achieved it. I dunno, you'll have to look that one up on your own.
The objective for most people in this, and really any other game at the time, was to not finish the game but to get the highest score possible before the time ran out. I played it for hours on end and would probably lose interest in 2 minutes these days. Our standards have changed ever so slightly over the past 40 years and if you were to go back in time with a PS4 and were somehow able to get the scientists back then to figure out what an HDMI port is you would probably get robbed and burned at the stake for being a witch.
Now let's move forward in time about 5 years when the system that basically killed Atari (well, they kind of killed themselves for the most part) called Nintendo emerged on the scene and basically blew us all away from the word go. Super Mario Bros was just so epic no one could live without this system and Atari was long forgotten and basically no one cared about anything else.
Because of my fond memories of Pitfall I was just so damn excited to see what this new age Nintendo system could do with one of my all time favorite titles.
At first glance the game seemed like it was going to be awesome. You were no longer restricted to just going left and right and the "world" just seemed huge! Unfortunately, the game absolutely sucked!
For starters, the very first ladder you encounter, should you climb down it, would kill you. Normally games would ease you into this sort of thing but whoever made this game thought it would be funny to create an impossible path right out of the gate. Ok, whatever... we move on.
Basically, everything kills our hero Harry. It doesn't matter if it is a spike pit, bats, fruit flies, and there was probably some dysentery mixed in there as well but I never made it that far into the game.
The music was awful, even for the NES, the graphics were awful compared to other NES games, the gameplay was repetitive and stupid. The objectives are unclear and there is no indication as to where you are actually meant to be going at any point in time. Mostly you are just wandering aimlessly until something eventually kills you (and everything kills you.)
There are certain parts of the game where you have to go up and up and up and if you make one tiny mistake or some flickering enemy glitch appears out of nowhere and it will shuffle you all the way back to the bottom of the pit. Returning to the top would take 20 minutes or so and the same thing happens again until you eventually take the game out of the console and throw it across the room - probably bash up the controller as well.
All of the items that you need in order to progress are hidden, and are only revealed if you jump in a very specific location. Where is the logic in this? The only items that aren't hidden by this manner was the bars of gold.
This would be all fine and dandy if there was a shop somewhere that you could purchase powerups or something but nah, there isn't any of that. The only purpose that the gold has is to get a higher score and well, I don't think anyone really cared about that anymore - by the time we were all NES'd we only wanted to get to the end of the game and didn't pay any attention to scores at all. I find it strange when any game has a "score" attribute in it unless there is some sort of online competition and well, the internet didn't exist back in 1987 for 99.8% of the global population.
I don't know if this game was designed to force kids into pressuring their parents to buy some sort of strategy guide because they give you literally no indication in the game as to what you are supposed to do in order to complete it. I know that I was frustrated enough by this game before I got even I guess half-way through it to even bother playing it any more. It killed the Pitfall legacy and if there were sequels that were ever made after this one, I certainly would have ignored them.
There are a lot of bad sequels out there but I really believe that this one might be one of the worst, possibly the worst ever made. If you want to torture yourself with this god-awful game, you can do so for free with the ROM HERE. I highly recommend that you do NOT do so.