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Pitfall: A Classic Game Postmortem

GDC Festival of Gaming · talk · Watch on YouTube

Game history & retro gamingGame programming & enginesGame design

What it is

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.

  • 2 people recommended it
  • 2 different months
  • 1 strong recommendations
  • first 2021, last 2024

What HN commenters said

  1. “I'm linking at the relevant timestamp, but the whole video is pure Atari 2600 goodness.”

    Pitfall's creator explains it; pure Atari 2600 goodness.

    netmare, 2024-04 · Strong recommendation · in “Inside the Super Nintendo cartridges”

  2. “the GDC post-mortem of pitfall has some more info, and I found it pretty entertaining.”

    GDC postmortem with more Pitfall details, entertaining.

    canthonytucci, 2021-05 · Recommendation · in “How Atari 2600 Game Pitfall Builds Its World”

Excerpts from Hacker News comments, linked to the originals. Summaries and labels were written by a language model from those comments.

Topics: pitfall, gdc, retro games, postmortem, game programming

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