For whatever reason I'm having a good amount of trouble writing about Pitfall 2. I don't know if it's because the game itself is so unusual, or that I don't know how to write about Atari games. It's not like most other Atari games though. Most console games back then were simply point grabbers. Your purpose would be to collect as many points as possible before you died. Pitfall 2 radically changed the formula. In this game you couldn't die, and you had a definite goal. The game still has you running around collecting points, but this time around things were much more complicated.
Pitfall 2 is one of the few Atari games I'm going to be able to write about in the standard format, so hopefully you enjoy this one. You won't get getting many like it. This game is the sequel to the wildly popular Pitfall, which is often the game given credit for creating the platform genre. I have no idea how true that is, but knowing games it probably isn't at all. Can anyone think of an older game which has you walking back and forth on a plane, collecting things, and jumping over pits? I guess Donkey Kong is older if that counts.
Actually now that I think about it, that's about all you do in Pitfall. The whole point of that one is to use the upper and lower parts of the screen to find the shortest routes between treasures. You have twenty minutes to find as much as you can without falling in any holes or getting eaten by crocodiles. Pitfall 2 has much more freedom. The clock is gone this time around, and also it lets you move every which way. You can jump in the water and swim, or find a balloon and float. The fact that it goes vertical as well as horizontal must've been amazing back in 1984. It also has specific goals. Pitfall Harry has to find a lost diamond, his niece, and his pet lion. After he does this he does a little jig and the game ends. It's a surprisingly satisfying experience for such and old game.
Probably the most unique thing about this game is that Pitfall Harry cannot die. There are certain checkpoints throughout the game, and when he gets hit by something he is simply spirited away to the last checkpoint. Instead of dying you lose points and have to do that section over again. It can get frustrating, especially in the final section with all the low flying birds and bats. It would make me want to pull my hair out if I had any.
The fact that collecting points is such a priority in this game puts it in a really interesting spot in gaming history. 1984 would be the year that Atari would essentially implode. It was also right around this time that we lost Colecovision, Intellivision, Odyssey 2, and basically all the consoles of that generation. The video game marked seemed almost dead until late 1985 when the NES came along and saved the world. It featured a brand new type of game which emphasized exploration and goal completion over point collecting. Pitfall 2 exists as both an old fashioned point collector and a newer platform style game. It was one of the few times after 1981 that Atari put out a game that was truly innovative and fun. After that point they were usually one or the other, or even more often neither.
So as you can tell, I'm a big fan of Pitfall 2. I think it is much better than the first one, and overall one of the best games on the system. Even though there are no lives it's still a challenge. This game has both the satisfaction of finishing something and the excitement and replay value of a classic arcade game. When I was playing this game, I told my girlfriend that I was really going to gush about this game. Honestly I said even more nice things about it than I expected. It really is a classic.
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