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Comment by bee_rider | Hacker News Reader

> Computing used to be constrained as well. I love this story about the development of the Atari 2600 game Pitfall. Most of the game's design was a clever set of choices to get something fun working on the limited hardware designed to run Pong.

Has anyone actually tried to play Pitfall! lately? It is, like, a pretty bad and un-fun game, doesn’t hold up as well as pong or pac-man at all. I think it was impressive at the time because it was at the limit of what the system could do.

It seems like a counter example to the thesis of the piece IMO. I get the idea that constraints can become part of the design and you get interesting ideas. But in this case, Pitfall! just does it’s best to mitigate the constraints and becomes a worse version of every successor that was made after the limitations were cleared.

> We will only have settings that fit on one screen.

But, like, please don’t actually remove all the setting, that’s annoying.

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Pitfall requires you to be willing to get a pencil and paper out to map it, and carefully track that underground, each screen change is three above-ground screen changes. (Which, mercifully, is documented in the manual: https://www.gamesdatabase.org/media/system/atari_2600/manual... ) The real game is trying to explore and plan a route to collect all the treasures in under the time limit.

This is an explanation, not any sort of moralization. I'm completely unwilling to expend this amount of effort on a game either. Old school dungeon crawlers need the same thing, so most of those are pretty difficult to get into even if they are good in the abstract. I don't mind a modern game working like Etrian Odyssey and creating a hybrid map making system but pencil & paper is not something I'm interested in.

The game Animal Well is popular right now if you want a modern game that urges you to use some note taking tools in a similar way.

I was just playing this myself. Felt like finding a gem in a sea of uninteresting games.

I think Pitfal holds up much better than pong especially in how single player games evolved. There’s some nuance that’s easy to miss, such as the player’s score getting penalized for actions that don’t kill them. The manual provides both the number of treasures and the max possible score, so it’s got a meaningful end goal. https://atariage.com/manual_page.php?SystemID=2600&ItemTypeI...

There’s basically 3 levels in how players should approach the game. Basic mechanics which aren’t that difficult, but time pressure and trying to remember a rough and there’s a meaningful challenge. Exploration/ Routing, options are limited but exist so you need to discover and remember the games layout. The correct route crossing over your starting position also means you can explore significantly further than an optimal run. And finally actually putting together a run without hitting 20 minutes or 3 deaths to find all 32 treasures.

Put it together and you’ve got a basic but perfectly playable game someone could sink a lot of time into even 40 years after release.

I think one of the best constrained system was the original GameBoy. It was voluntary conceived to be cheap and basically impossible to program without hacking it. Hell, there wasn’t even enough memory to hold an entire screen frame.

Interestingly, there were really few bad games on the GameBoy. I think that was because you were forced to invest more than money to create a game. Getting more people wouldn’t help you to get it done, your only solution was to have a smart team who would be capable of working through the insane constraints.

I disagree with there being few bad game boy games. Most of them were shockingly bad at the time, and have aged worse IMO. What there was was a few absolute diamonds that set up some incredible sequels.

Also the system had a quite good lifespan, so there was a long time for gems to show up. And, probably, the designers also became accustomed to the limitations and learned how to design around them well.

Plus, we were kids sitting in the back seat of cars and on busses… the nostalgia factor is real, not hard to beat activities like “staring out the window” or “annoying your sibling.”

Yup, the issue with constraints is that if there is any pressure at all you'll end up trying to squeeze as much as possible within them which makes the design space harder to work in. Technology constraints in particular excite a specific kind of programmer and sometimes lead to worse games because it becomes hard to work on the actual game itself.

> Has anyone actually tried to play Pitfall! lately? ... I think it was impressive at the time because it was at the limit of what the system could do.

I'd argue Solaris is, by far, much more impressive than pitfall.

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