Pitfall: A Classic Game Postmortem
GDC Festival of Gaming2 HN recommenders · recommended in 2 months, 2021–2024
talk · intermediate · evergreen · 2021–2024 on HN
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.
Recommended as an entertaining, technical look at squeezing a game into a tiny Atari 2600, told by the original developer.
Up next
12 mo on HNLexical Scanning in Go - Rob Pike
GoogleFOSSSydney
13 HN recommender · 2012–2025
9 mo on HNGoogle I/O 2012 - Go Concurrency Patterns
Google for Developers
9 HN recommender · 2012–2025
3 mo on HNOrigins of Go Concurrency style by Rob Pike
jasonofthel33t
3 HN recommender · 2013–2025
2 mo on HNHow Analog Color TV Works: The Beginnings
Technology Connections
2 HN recommender · 2019–2026
17 mo on HN8 Bit & '8 Bitish' Graphics-Outside the Box
GDC Festival of Gaming
13 HN recommender · 2018–2026
12 mo on HNReverse emulating the NES to give it SUPER POWERS!
suckerpinch
12 HN recommender · 2018–2025
10 mo on HNThe Ultimate Game Boy Talk (33c3)
media.ccc.de
10 HN recommender · 2017–2026
9 mo on HNHow Crash Bandicoot Hacked The Original Playstation | War Stories | Ars Technica
Ars Technica
13 HN recommender · 2020–2026
9 mo on HNThe Engoodening of No Man's Sky
Internet Historian
9 HN recommender · 2020–2025
10 mo on HNComputer program that learns to play classic NES games
suckerpinch
9 HN recommender · 2015–2025
9 mo on HNSNES Code Injection -- Flappy Bird in SMW
SethBling
9 HN recommender · 2016–2025
7 mo on HN'Diablo': A Classic Game Postmortem
GDC Festival of Gaming
8 HN recommender · 2018–2023
3 comments from Hacker News
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 talks about the original Deus Ex, Myst, Loom, Adventure, Marble Madness, Ms. Pac-Man, Paperboy, Lemmings, and more. I find these videos very soothing and nostalgic. Got to rewatch them now... [1]: ▶ this video
▶ this 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.
You can find a number of technical deep-dives for classic video game consoles where people have had do deal with very limited resources. This video springs to mind as one example: ▶ this video