Celebrating the 40th Anniversary of Pitfall II: Lost Caverns!

Have you played Atari today?

This awesome video game was released on February 17, 1984.

Copyright Activision.

Pitfall II: Lost Caverns was a video game developed by David Crane for the Atari 2600. It was released in 1984 by Activision. The player controls Pitfall Harry, who must explore in wilds of Peru to find the Raj Diamond, and rescue his niece Rhonda and their animal friend Quickclaw. The game world is populated by enemies and hazards that variously cause the player to lose points and return to a checkpoint.

The game was a sequel to Pitfall! (1982) one of the best-selling Atari 2600 video games. Crane said the Atari 2600 hardware was out of date when developing the sequel, which led to him creating a custom computer chip called the Display Processor Chip for Pitfall II: Lost Caverns. This allowed for more complex graphics and background music in the game. It became the top selling console game of the year and was ported to other consoles and home computers. At the June 1984 Consumer Electronics Show, Activision did not reveal any new games for Atari 2600; the end of an era…

Pitfall II received positive reviews with the expanded gameplay of the game, with the more positive reviews of the game finding it superior to Pitfall!. Retrospective reviews have continued to be positive, with Retro Gamer listing it as the best game on the Atari 2600 and other critics noting its gameplay innovations, such as being among the first games to include a checkpoint system.

Source: Wikipedia.org

Interesting… Did playing Atari 2600 and other video/arcade games improve our eye-hand coordination and fine motor skills?

Perhaps…

“Griffith and colleagues published the first finding demonstrating individuals with video-game experience outperforming those with no video-game experience. They reported superior performance by VGPs on a rotary pursuit task, suggesting they possessed enhanced hand-eye coordination (Griffith et al., 1983)…”

“Orosy-Fildes and Allan (1989) tested participants on a simple color discrimination task and found that participants who played a video-game on the Atari 2600 system responded significantly faster than those who did not play video games…”

Latham AJ, Patston LL, Tippett LJ. The virtual brain: 30 years of video-game play and cognitive abilities. Front Psychol. 2013 Sep 13;4:629. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00629. PMID: 24062712; PMCID: PMC3772618.

Memories.

I remember earning fabric patches for achieving high scores on several Activision games, including these two titles… A high score of 99,000 points was needed to earn the Pitfall II “Cliff Hangers” patch. Not to be outdone, my late father achieved a perfect score on Pitfall II: Lost Caverns in 1984.

Pitfall

Pitfall II: Lost Caverns

Source: digitpress.com

Television screenshot of my high score on Pitfall II: Lost Caverns circa 1984.

Courtesy of Anthony Woodard

“Whether it’s riding a bicycle, throwing a football, lifting weights, typing a report, or playing scales on a guitar, given enough repetition and practice, we eventually are able to complete such tasks without thinking about them. This is known as “muscle memory”. At its core, muscle memory is essentially, process-driven.

Similarly, processes are everywhere, and are especially important in operational areas, areas that are of an urgent or time-sensitive nature and must be completed with a high-degree of accuracy. Whether it is when someone enters millions of dollars’ worth of stock trades, lands a commercial airliner filled with hundreds of passengers, or administers anesthesia throughout a surgery, there is no room for hesitation, no room for error. The proper behavior (mind) and action (body) (together, process) must be second nature. Practice makes perfect. That being said, being that absolute or true perfection is generally unattainable, we should commit to a journey of continuous improvement (through learning and more practice).

Procedural memory, including muscle memory, is also a key component to successful improvisation, a skill that acclaimed, multi-Grammy-award-winning Jazz guitarist Pat Metheny, who happened to grow up only a few miles away from me and the local music store I frequented, regularly demonstrates.”

- Woodard, Anthony. “Muscle Memory...”. Mar. 2, 2023