My mother is the only other person in my family who enjoyed video games, and she only really enjoyed three: Tetris (Windows Entertainment Pack), Columns (Sega Genesis), and Pitfall: The Mayan Adventure (Win95). So Pitfall was a real outlier. I'd watch her for hours as she hoarded boomerangs in anticipation of the boss battles against one, sometimes two jaguars, or god forbid she made it all the way to the giant golem. So naturally I looked to play its ancestor first.

Immediately I recognized the scorpion because Mayan Adventure paid homage by shoehorning this primitive graphic into its 16-bit environment.

I found the controls intuitive, but then again I've been playing video games since I could barely read. The objective is not immediately clear, but there's clearly a 20 minute time limit for whatever it is. I found that if I went far enought to the right there was a silver/gold bar of some sort.

Graphically this game far outshines many of the other 2600 games. There's lush, varied backgrounds and interesting combinations of scenery. The running animation is smooth, the vine animation is clean, and he even sinks into the pits if you fall in. The sound effects are sparse but fitting, especially the Tarzan warble when jumping off a vine.

Without a manual my instincts told me that each screen was being randomly generated and probably just went on into infinity, the objective being to achieve the highest score before time runs out. It's not an unreasonable hypothesis; many popular games were designed without an end-game like Pac-Man and Donkey Kong. I was not very motivated to play the game if that objective was in fact true; thankfully my hypothesis was wrong.

After doing some research I found that there is 32 pieces of treasure to be collected in the time limit, and the map is deterministic. That's a great feature; I immediately want to map out the whole game, take measurements, and strategize the best path for completing the objective. And then once you've got a handle on collecting the treasure, you can further refine your skill in pursuit of a perfect score! The research also brought up this great post-mortem by the author, David Crane. The amount of ingenuity that saturates every aspect of this simple, primitive game is astounding!

I remember playing this as a kid somehow. Maybe it was on the internet, or at a friends house, or maybe it's been implanted in me for some nefarious reason. Nonetheless, I remember being attracted to the rainbow stripe of static and the cover art. The name immediately triggers that sci-fi sense, that there's something cool underlying the art and everything. Who is Yar? Who is Yar seeking revenge against? And for what?

I mentioned the 'void' of a black TV screen in an earlier post, and boy does Yar's take advantage: there's no frame! Every other 2600 game I've played had some frame that seperates the score and other information like that from the field of gameplay. I think it's a great decision that amplifies the immersion.

I'm a sucker for rainbows and I still love the static stuff. Come to find out, it's actually the game's source code just loaded into the graphics registers! Atari's legal department got wind of this and was worried someone might steal the code by piecing together screenshots. They weren't satisfied with the copyright situation until the author put the static through a masking process before displaying!

I kind of like zoning out with this game. It's simple, and pretty unchanging, but challenging.

This game is not much fun. The computer is frustratingly good, and there's little in the way of strategizing. It took me a while to determine shot angle was based mostly, if not entirely, on the distance between the ball and player when it is struck. Therefore to get a good shot off you must risk missing the ball entirely. The graphics are very dull, and little to no need to approach the net. In sum it was boring, difficult, and unrewarding.

I think the thing that makes these games so memorable is their role in video game history. The objective from a design perspective was not to make the player hemorrage quarters, but instead to engage and entertain. So to that end, every new innovation they made was new for the field over all. Pitfall introduced players to a sidelong platformer. Yar's Revenge brought explosions and psychedelic colors to an often drab library of games. Players were introduced to new paradigms as they were invented.

These games also demonstrate the intrinsic relationship between games and their platform. The authors had to first ask themselves what they were capable of creating with the 2600, and only after they had convinced themselves of the answer could they begin to ask themselves what they wanted to create. Pitfall! was crafted around a running man animation the author invented two years prior. The author of Adventure was told by his boss not to pursue the impossible, but he proved him wrong and built a game around this counter-proof. Every memorable game was a bold experiment who's success was completely unpredictable. These games were the work of individuals, not teams, and they sometimes even bare their signature. These are the symptoms of art pieces. Rudimentary though they may be, they pushed the frontier of their medium technologically and artistically.

From this relationship we may extrapolate that new technology will always inspire new gaming paradigms. But I doubt any technological advance today could inspire the kind of creative fervor that followed the invention of the format.