You can control your direction when falling, it's just slow and you have to keep your joystick in the position you want to go.

@btr3k

9 ай бұрын

Came here to mention this too. It really makes you take care to land correctly, but you can indeed pixel-inch your way back to the edge by holding the joystick in a direction.

Pitfall II also had another trick up it's sleeve: The level design. Rather than storing levels in the traditional sense, every scene in the game was based on a math calculation. I.E. every scene had a number that would generate what was supposed to be there rather than storing tiles in memory. By using a calculation to draw the scenes, less data was required to draw out every scene. The game would simply go, "what number does this room have?" Then, using that number, it would generate the scene based on very simple graphics data. David Crane was a genius in so many ways.

Excellent Atari channels video

After listening to Pitfall II's music, there are some similarities between that and the music for the NES version of A Boy and His Blob. I have to wonder if it's because both games were designed by David Crane.

@kbramlett6877

9 ай бұрын

David Crane was in fact the lead programmer and producer for the classic NES Game A Boy and His Blob: Trouble on Blobolonia." As for Super Pitfall for the NES, David Crane had nothing to do with that craptacular game. With that said, Pitfall II for the Atari VCS (2600) was ahead of its time and did things that nobody thought were possible with the hardware of the console. One primary thing about this classic game, it was the first game to have checkpoints.

Underrated channel, deserves more recognition

@LordOrwell

9 ай бұрын

he's getting there. He only had like a thousand in january

@johneygd

9 ай бұрын

Am glad it’s underrated because it’s already old news and it’s already sooo many times told before on other youtube channels and so it becomes to me predictible as well for what he would say about those stuff like this,i hate how everyone tries to take a piece of the pie and do the same thing all over again.

@rainbowspace994

9 ай бұрын

I know right?

@thedinobros1218

2 ай бұрын

Agreed

Extra trivia for Pitfall 2 - for the 5200 and Atari 8-bit versions of the game, there is an entirely new world to play after you defeat the first level. Anyway, really enjoying the videos POJR, keep up the great work!

@TheDarkThunder

4 ай бұрын

I remember when I first unlocked that second game, the drunk bats and fire ants scared me lol

Plaque Attack. Not “Plague” Attack

@urbanknish

9 ай бұрын

Great idea for a game though! You play Dr. Faustus, who cooks up a bioweapon in a Chinese lab.

@chrisgardiner2215

9 ай бұрын

😅 I was going to say something similar

7:19 Hey! It's Jack Black! Oh, and it is _kinda_ possible to control your fall in Pitfall II, but it's extremely slow, like 1 pixel per floor. You'll still fall several floors before you can steer yourself back to a ledge, but at least you can stop yourself from falling all the way do the bottom.

Hey, POJR! The first Pitfall actually has an "ending", so to speak... If u manage to get ALL the treasures, the game screen will actually freeze, showing how much time u had left and ur score... not an easy thing to accomplish, though... Anyways, great video, as always... cheers!

1:57 Venture, an arcade game released just four months after Rally-X, had _much_ more sophisticated music than both Rally-X and Donkey Kong. It was the first arcade game that used three voices for BGM, and there really weren't other contenders for years.

Actually, you *can* steer which direction you fall toward in Pitfall 2. Push left or right and you'll drift until you hit a ledge.

So sad that no one can get the rights to the original Frogger music to release the arcade version as it originally was. :(

@Mrshoujo

9 ай бұрын

Frogger for the Starpath Supercharger.

@BillBinder

9 ай бұрын

@@Mrshoujo Oh sure. I've got plenty of ways to play the original. Just a shame that future generations and casual players on modern consoles won't be able to hear that weird Japanese folk song. Cheers. :) Also, the Supercharger version is fantastic.

I truly look forward to your videos Pojr. Always great content!

Smurf Rescue in Gargamel's Castle and Dig Dug had good music in them.

I am sure that you will hit 10k subs before the end of the year, your content is great! Thank you! ❤

10:48 I think you can control your movement as you fall, it's just a minute amount though. Only around a pixel or two per floor. I haven't played it in a while, so I may be wrong, but I owned this as a kid, and I distinctly remember holding the joystick to the left or right and eventually hitting an actual floor. Sometimes if you're too centered in the fall, it will take a while or you won't make it before hitting the water below though.

great job man. seems like just yesterday I remember you hitting 1k subs and you're almost at 9k! That's awesome man. Keep up the great content.

it's "Plaque Attack"; (plack - attack) it rhymes.

I remember the game Haunted House winning awards for sound effects (not music).

You deserve more than 10K subs POJR. 🙂🙂🙂🙂

You are brilliant, Pojr! 😃👍

For real, this is the best video game music of all time.

I just found your channel in my feed. Fascinated as I am with classic video game consoles, I think I'll stick around. It's 'Plaque Attack', not 'Plague Attack'.

Pitfall 2 was one of my favorites. Mountain King had some kick-ass music also

@stickyfox

9 ай бұрын

I still play MK on my 2600! I was going to mention it, but you took care of that.

Pitfall 2 music is really awesome

Awesome video! You covered all the bases on this great game. Having somebody from your generation cover these older games is interesting because you are most likely experiencing them for the first time. Thanks for taking time to make all these wonderful videos!!! Oh, and if you have access to some of the various joysticks for the Atari 2600, I would love to see your reaction to some of them. There were some very unique 3rd party options back in the 80's, and none of them resemble the modern controllers.

Moon patrol is another game that has background music. Its only one channel but its pretty decent considering its atari. You may need to play with the difficulty switches to get the music to play. Its a decent rendition of its arcade music

This was a great video. You have a really relaxing way of talking and going through the history of things. I like to watch your videos before bed to clear my mind and de-stress.

Another and more important reason why it’s so rare for an atari 2600 to have any music is because each channel in the TIA only uses a 30 kHz 5-bit frequency divider (31~32 different frequencies), in contrast to the 11-bit, 10-bit and even the 8-bit frequency dividers used for the NES’ 2a03, SMS’ SN76489 and Atari’s POKEY respectively.

The tune from Moon Patrol gets stuck in my head to this day.

Hey Pojr, love your channel sir, keep up the good work.

Keep up the good work Pojr, enjoying your videos.

Actually when you are falling in Pitfall II you absolutely can move your joystick and holding it to the left or right will drift Pitfall Harry in the direction you hold the joystick in and he will drift and land on a platform before reaching the water at the bottom.

The 2600 has so many cool stories and interesting trivia like this. Good Video POJR!.

I had braces until I was 34! Stay strong ❤️✊

At the time, Atari2600 games had artwork representing the games, not screenshots. The technology to screen capture wasn't there yet, unless you were a major studio. Also, you CAN control your player falling in Pitfall II. It's very slow, but there is a tiny bit of what today is called "Mario Physics".

⚡Awesome video, as always, POJR! 👍😁 You deserve way more than 🔟k subscribers... 👊😎 Shoutout, for another Activision classic, on Atari 2600: H.E.R.O...! 🎮😉

Another limitation with the 2 sound channels is their frequencies don’t align well to typical notes. I watched an Activision postmortem talk about this. For one of their games they had a musician design an opening melody and they marked which keys he could use because they could play the frequency within a certain percentage. As I understand it, the DPC chip didn’t add two channels but played and mixed 4 channels and output the level to an address and it had to be copied to the volume register. I’m not sure if this blocked one of the two sound channels, but they still had one because it was used for jumping and touching checkpoints. As David Crane put it in his postmortem, he’s a chip designer by trade so he “cheated” by putting in an extra chip. Btw, I recommend the GDC postmortems.

New Pojr!

Plague attack? Ohhh Plaque (plack) attack. Got me to switch tabs to see what game we were talking about. Also, it looks a lot like Megamania (or vice versa - not sure which came out first)

@dtester

9 ай бұрын

I was thinking the same thing. Q not a G ^_^

Thanks for the video. I still have my Pitfall patch

I don't know about everyone else, but I was always super pissed when I got a home port of an arcade game and stuff was missing. Like music, or animations.....etc. I got Shinobi for the C64 and it was pretty good but I was so mad that the music didn't play during the gameplay. The boss didn't appear at the end of the levels to taunt you either, and Joe didn't have the walking animation when you enter a door/cave. I was like ten years old so I didn't understand hardware limitations but I hated the missing stuff. Also, when you say "They," Pitfall II was actually made by David Crane. He designed the DPC and made everything except the music. Crane was well known to all gamers during that era.

the music at 9:42 sounds soooo good! amazing what a difference 2 extra channels make! it has very "sega master system" esque vibe which i love

Good stuff, keep it up.

I LOVE the hit sound in Combat! Blam you are outta here then your tank spins I loved it

There's a little more detail in Pitfalls single map. There's 256 individual screens (8 bit bytes can be 0-256) The game looks at the level numbers bits within the byte with each bit signifying a game element/feature on or off.

I was hoping to hear an elaboration on what was actually accomplished with the chip in Pitfall II. Here's a nutshell: The Atari 2600 does not provide a lane that allows game developers to tap directly into the console's sound output. The thing was developed in 1976, and had an expected shelf life of 3 years. Just having more than one voice was already revolutionary. So you can't just drop a chip in that "adds two voices." It doesn't work. What happens instead is the chip generates *FOUR* voices, and then provides 4-bit digital data reconstructed from mixing all those voices together. The cartridge's software then needs to plug that 4-bit digital data into the _volume register_ of one of the 2600's two native voices, in realtime, i.e. dozens of times per frame. In short, you can get the 2600 to play pretty much anything in one of its voices if you use this technique, but it does require an on-cartridge chip to provide the digital data, and a fair bit of the 2600's CPU time to perpetually tweak the volume to render that digital data. You can plainly hear that the music has a harsh, lo-fi quality to it-the consequence of it being only 4-bit audio. The other 2600 voice-the one not taken over by the music-is free to provide the various jumping, etc. sound effects. It would be nice to be able to say that what they came up with for this cartridge was revolutionary, but really the only revolutionary thing about it is that gives the effective result of a 2600 with 5 simultaneous voices. Something that was not repeated until the homebrew scene of the 2010s+. An earlier game, Quadrun, had already demonstrated the "tweaking the volume register" trick before Pitfall II. Quadrun plays a short digital sample of the developer saying "Quadrun", and because it's just data read from the cartridge, no special chip was needed. And before Quadrun, the very concept of accomplishing digital audio with this kind of trick was already old hat on 8-bit computers.

Skateboardin' on the 2600 is the first memory I have of music in a home game. I'd run the game just to listen to the song loop, good memories

Sega's Super Locomotive and Konami's Gyruss are where game music started to actually be good.

7:50 "They reuse a lot of the same screens to save space" Sort of. The trees and some other things might exist on multiple screens, but none of the screens are identical if you count what type of pit is present, whether there's a fire or alligators in the pit, logs etc and the way David Crane was able to do this is very clever in itself. Here he is explaining how he was able to do it: kzread.info/dash/bejne/f3aIk7GEZrmnebg.html

AtariAge makes a DPC-like board that allows games made in BASIC to have capabilities similar to Pitfall II. Anyone who wants to make their dream game has a fighting chance :)

I had no idea that Activision made a Pitfall 2. I feel like I missed out on a great game!

@tursilion

9 ай бұрын

You did! It's really solid! Maybe a bit thin by today's standards, but you should grab an emulator and give it a go. :) It does have a specific set of treasures you must collect, not just the gold bars. Music is catchy too ;)

It’s also one of the rare cases where an Atari 2600-title received an arcade-port. I played it a lot on my C64 and in the arcade.

The Atari 2600 is a performing machine. I don't know why the Intellivision has poor scrolling performances.

I didn't get Pitfall 2 till recently and it made me wish I had it back in the day. I like seeing Jack Black in that old Pitfall commercial

9:08 DSP is not for display processor chip, but "Digital signal processor"

Another thing that pissed off David Crand and his fellow programmers ia when they asked if they could be given credit on the packaging or the manual for their work, the CEO of Atari/Warner Communications said, and I am paraphrasing "You are no more important than the people who put the cartridges in the boxes. Activision was the very first third-party game developer in the world. On a different note, when Atari published the game Adventure, the programmer, Warren Robinet, created the very first secret in a video game. Which are now commonly known as "Easter Eggs." What he did is he programmed a secret room in the game and upon finding it, you were presented with his name. This went right under his boss('s) nose(s) This secret room was not discovered until long after he left Atari. A then 15-year-old Adam Clayton was credited as being the first person to find the secret room containing Roninet's name.

The fun is back, oh yes siree, it's the 2600 from Atari! It's the video system with games galore, from space invaders, to cars that roar. Now one more thing, it's got a really great price: under £50 - £50?! Well isn't that nice! The fun is is back, oh yes siree, it's the 2600 from Atari!

This was Activision in its full glory.. before Bobby Kotick waltzed in and destroyed it. BTW I didn't hear it mentioned in the video, did I miss it? the Pitfall II cartridge has a custom oscillator chip in it that makes the extra tones available to the CPU as a stream of data. The 2600 isn't fast enough to *generate* those tones using calculations, but if the data is available on the bus, it is fast enough to pass it right to the TIA to play as sound.

@joutoob9

9 ай бұрын

Maybe that is why there are a few places in PItfall 2 where the music slows down slightly when there's a lot of moving things on the screen at once.

cool content..keep up

you're wrong. You in fact can steer while falling. You just move really slowly. You might still fall five or six levels before hitting the side of the hole.

Pitfall II was and is indeed an incredible piece of work. I’m more fond of the arcade and C64 versions though (the latter I owned. It was so great).

I heard in another video that Frogger's music included copyrighted children's tunes so that's why it was missing from the ports.

Wait you have to do second smile. I have learned it was an very impressive feat to make the games for Atari years

One of the best games for the VCS! To bad we didn't see more from this very special chip :(

Sad to say I never owned the Pitfall games back in the day. I love the ambition Activision had back in the Atari days.

7:18 A very young Jack Black!

This game, Megamania and Frostbite were my favourite 2600 games growing up. The arcade version is awful though. Your videos are great and I learn something new each time.

It's a little vague in the video how a display chip results in more sound channels.

"this add-on could have been a game changer" (stealth dad joke)

Hi 😀 my partner really enjoys your videos and I am intrigued at your channel name. Is it short for Porick Jeremiah? 🙏

That's cool, did not know the Atari allowed an hardware expansion chips beyond the ROM. Thought it's NES that started it.

@intel386DX

9 ай бұрын

The super charger increases RAM size to 16KB if I am not mistaken. He have video about it too :)

At 4:09 trust me the Activision crew didn't have the hotties as in that stock video. lol

I loved Pitfall II the arcade game.

I played this once on Atari, a visitor had it. Years later I rented "Super Pitfall" for Nintendo from the video store, SO DISAPPOINTED that it was the 1st Pitfall, no balloon. Super lame

@pojr

Ай бұрын

Yeah it's weird much of a contrast Super Pitfall is. Activision made fantastic games on the 2600, but not so much on the NES.

They used this same music for Pitfall for the Tandy Colour Computer 3! The CoCo 3's version was much better of course.

Can anybody guess who the kid is in the Pitfall commercial? Let me know if you do.

Why it is called "display processing chip" when it only increase the sound channels 😅 ?

@tonyduffy7441

9 ай бұрын

It does do a bit more stuff, mainly to do with graphics, which wasn't mentioned here'. Is kinda technical though.. So generally it's thought of as 'that extra sound chip!' DPC are also the initials of the creator David Patrick Crane so that probably influenced the naming of it.

@intel386DX

9 ай бұрын

@@tonyduffy7441 so what are the additional graphic capabilitys of that chip ?

@tonyduffy7441

9 ай бұрын

I think the chip Is mostly involved with reading/writing data to offload effort from the 2600's CPU so it can perform more. Means enhanced detail per line - sharper resolution graphics (as opposed to Combat blocky) and better sprite and backgrounds management. It doesn't increase the standard colour/resolution of the console or anything. AtariAge has a thread 'How exactly does the Pitfall 2 DPC work?' but is a bit too technical for me..

I've watched a few of your videos and I'm now on a binge. Smashed that subscribe button 👍

could you talk about the N64 version of Resident Evil 2/Biohazard 2 someday

Journey Escape had bgm

I liked the background music for a boy and his blob nes when I first heard it but after a while it gets really annoying

Different system entirly but I was blown away back in the day with the music of the original Gyroscope on the original 48K ZX Spectrum. kzread.info/dash/bejne/ma190q2YYcedeKQ.html

pojr

leave it to a pojr video to have great editing, research, and visuals but also have one of the most cringy and uncomfortable intros on modern youtube lmao. video's worth it though

It was better on the Commodore 64.

What is it that POJR's obsession with Atari?

@zabustifu

9 ай бұрын

Why not? Everyone has their own history and passions.

Please buy a pop filter and make some attempt to normalize your audio.