How to play Pitfall II online
- Walk: left and right arrow keys
- Jump: Z or X (any of the side buttons)
- Ladders: press down just before Harry reaches a hole to climb down; press up to climb up
- Balloons: press a fire button to grab one, then steer left or right. Up speeds the balloon, down slows it.
- Crossing a shaft: press and hold a fire button just before the jump and keep pushing in the direction you are heading
- Start or restart: Enter
- Pause: P
The keypad is not used. Full screen, restart and save states are in the emulator’s toolbar; move the mouse over the screen to see it.
Gameplay
Pitfall Harry is deep under the Peruvian Andes looking for three things: his niece Rhonda, his cowardly cat Quickclaw and the Raj diamond. There is no clock and there are no lives. Instead you start with 4,000 points, and every mishap costs you some of them. Touch a frog, bat, condor, eel or albino scorpion and Harry floats back to the last red cross he passed, losing points on the way; an unplanned fall costs points too. The crosses are the game’s checkpoints, so each one you touch is a little progress saved.
The caverns go down a long way. Harry climbs ladders, swims underground rivers and rides balloons up deep shafts. Along the way he collects gold bars worth 5,000 points each, and the big prizes are the cave rat (15,000), Rhonda and Quickclaw (10,000 each) and the Raj diamond (20,000). Activision offered a cloth patch to anyone who sent in a photo of a score of 99,000 or more.
On the Atari 2600 the game ends when all three are found. On the 5200 it does not: a portal opens into a second cavern with new hazards, among them rabid bats, fire ants and piranha fish, and new treasures that pay surprise bonus points. The title screen calls this version “The Adventurer’s Edition”.
Tips
- Touch every cross you see. A detour to a checkpoint is cheap; being sent back past three screens of bats is not.
- Watch the score, not the enemies. You cannot die, so a few hits are fine if they get you somewhere. A long string of hits can wipe out your points, though.
- Slow the balloon down. Pull down while floating to give yourself time to steer around the bats in the shafts.
- Map it. The caverns loop back on themselves, and the ladders you skip early are often the way to the next treasure.
The story behind Pitfall II on the 5200
David Crane’s original Pitfall! was Activision’s best-selling game, and its spin-off cartoon and merchandise introduced Rhonda and Quickclaw. For the sequel, released for the Atari 2600 on 17 February 1984, Crane designed a custom chip, the Display Processor Chip, that gave the old console smoother graphics and a four-part musical score. The game debuted at ninth place on Billboard’s video game chart and became the best-selling console game of 1984.
Mike Lorenzen wrote the Atari 5200 and Atari 8-bit computer versions using Crane’s original code with new graphics routines. While he waited for the ColecoVision and Commodore 64 ports to be finished, he used the spare time to add the second cavern, because he wanted to “do something and make it better”. The 5200 cartridge (Activision FZ-011) reached shops in November 1984, a few months after the console had been discontinued. Apart from slightly fuller trees in the computer version, the two Atari versions look the same.
