THE VIDEO SHELF · atari 2600 game development
Pitfall: A Classic Game Postmortem
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 HN readers recommended it
Recommended as an entertaining, technical look at squeezing a game into a tiny Atari 2600, told by the original developer.
This is a summary from the source dataset, not an endorsement by Hacker News or the video creator.
Video & recommendation details
- Creator / channel
- GDC Festival of Gaming
- Topic
- atari 2600 game development
- Format
- talk
- Level
- intermediate
- HN recommenders in dataset
- 2
- HN mentions in dataset
- 3
- Recommendation years in dataset
- 2021–2024
These counts and years describe the included Hacker News records; they are not YouTube views or the video’s publication date.
From the original HN conversations
Excerpts from the recorded comments. Follow each source for the full comment and surrounding discussion.
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 …
netmare on Hacker News · 2024-04
In Inside the Super Nintendo cartridges[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.
canthonytucci on Hacker News · 2021-05
In How Atari 2600 Game Pitfall Builds Its World
Summaries, classifications and recommendation records are from the HackerTube source dataset. Read about this library and its limitations.