Pitfall II: Lost Caverns

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Pitfall II: Lost Caverns
Cover art from the Atari 2600 version of Pitfall II
Developer(s)	Activision
Publisher(s)	Activision
Designer(s)	David Crane
Series	Pitfall
Release date(s)	1984
Genre(s)	Platform game
Mode(s)
Platform(s)	Apple II Arcade Atari 2600 Atari 5200 Atari 8-bit family ColecoVision Commodore 64 MSX ZX Spectrum
Media	Cartridge
Input	Joystick

Pitfall II: Lost Caverns is the sequel to the popular video game Pitfall!. Both games were designed and written by David Crane and published by Activision in the early 1980s. The star of the games is Pitfall Harry, an 8-bit Indiana Jones-style character.

The original Pitfall! has Harry exploring a jungle, collecting treasures, and avoiding danger in the forms of crocodiles, scorpions, snakes, and quicksand. Although the background does not scroll, the game was one of the first large platform games for a home video game console. Lost Caverns stays true to the gameplay of the original but greatly expands the scope of the environment as Harry descends deep into the catacombs. The screen scrolls vertically only, unlike the original, which did not scroll at all. Lost Caverns players had to reach the edge of the screen to move it over to the next horizontal area.

While faithful in many respects to its predecessor, Lost Caverns featured numerous changes to make it play differently from the original game. Pitfall Harry is no longer bound the 20-minute time limit and can swim in the game's water areas; leap into chasms, falling into an underground river or onto a ledge; and ascend to new areas using a balloon. Electric eels, vultures, bats, and toads are new hazards.

A unique feature for the time is that Harry has unlimited lives. When Harry dies, he loses points as he floats back to the last continue point, marked with a red cross.

Two new unplayable characters debut in Lost Caverns: Quickclaw, Harry's cowardly pet mountain lion, and Rhonda, his adventure-seeking niece. Both of these characters also appear with Harry in the Saturday Supercade children's cartoon based on the Pitfall! games. (In fact, Rhonda and Quickclaw were created for Saturday Supercade a full year before this game was released)

Movie poster-style artwork from the instruction manual features the characters and elements from the game.

Another enhancement over the previous game is the addition of a soundtrack. The musical cues act as subtle rewards and punishments for performance. The main "heroic" theme plays for a short while before reaching a loop of atmospheric music. When Harry collects a treasure, the main theme begins again. If Harry dies, a downbeat version of the theme plays, continuing until Harry succeeds at finding more treasure.

The Atari 5200 and 400/800 version of the game is divided into two very large levels. In the first, Harry's goal is to rescue Quickclaw and Rhonda, who are both lost deep within the caverns, with secondary goals being to collect the Raj Diamond and a specific mouse. Once he rescues both Quickclaw and Rhonda, Harry moves on to the second level, which features new enemies and a more intricate map design. The goals in this second level were to rescue your unnamed friend, pick up a hat, flute, and rope, then take them to an end screen where you could levitate the rope and escape the caverns along with your friends.

Pitfall II: Lost Caverns was one of the largest games ever created for the Atari 2600 and featured elements previously considered impossible on hardware that was already over 6 years old at the time. Smooth scrolling, detailed animation, and a musical score that includes multiple channels were all made possible by custom hardware built inside the game cartridge. Crane designed and patented a component he called the Display Processor Chip (DPC), which could greatly enhance the 2600's graphics capabilities and could process music in 3 channels plus drums. Crane hoped that the DPC would be used by other game designers to further extend the life of the aging console, but the video game crash of 1983 made this impossible.

The game was originally created for the Atari 2600 and released in 1984, but it was also faithfully ported to the Atari 5200, ColecoVision, CoCo, Apple II, Atari 8-bit and Commodore 64 systems. The Atari 5200 and Atari 8-bit ports are notable for containing a "second quest," exclusive to these versions; after successfully completing the game, a portal opens up near Harry which will take him to a new and more difficult set of caverns. The goal in this section is to avoid fast moving ants and crazy bats, and to find a hat, flute, rope, and unnamed friend. You must go to a special end screen after collecting these objects where you will levitate out of the caverns with your friends from both parts and some treasure. Your score for section one is frozen at the end of that level, carried over to the second level, and added to/subtracted at that point.

In 1985, Sega licensed the game from Activision and turned it into an arcade game, which turned out to be a cartoonish hybrid of both Pitfall! games. A home port of this game also appeared on Sega's SG-1000 game console in Japan.