How a developer hid Pitfall III inside Pitfall II, and how Activision almost made him delete it.

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The story surrounding Pitall II’s second world has taken on mythical proportions – no doubt in part because recollections have faded over the years and much of the documentation is lost. Some claim you have to collect treasures in a certain order to unlock the second half, which is why it’s an Easter egg. You don’t. Some claim that the extra level is hidden in the other versions. It isn’t. The only way to play it is to finish the first half of Pitfall II on an Atari 8-bit computer or the 5200. If you’re curious, you can watch the second world unlock in this WorldofLongPlays video (played via an emulator).

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So Mike started to think bigger, convincing himself that if the original game had 256 screens with seven things – “the alligators and whatnot” – he needed to have 256 screens with seven brand-new things. “One was the rabid bat,” he said, and offered in one of many asides during our conversation: “The rabid bat actually has a repeating pattern, all you had to do is study it.”

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“‘We can’t have [that], Brad. We are marketing the two products together and they need to have the exact same gameplay. You are going to have to strip that second game out of the product.’ I couldn’t change his mind, none of my arguments worked. I drove back to the office trying to figure out how I was going to give Mike this terrible news.”

Fregger recalls that he told Mike that “we are going to have the best, damn, Easter egg ever.”

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The ending seemed so elaborate compared to other games, I just had to ask Mike about it – who didn’t disappoint and offered another anecdote:

“I wanted the classic snake-charming music [hums the tune]. And so they brought in a musician and composer, named Ed Bogas, who wrote commercial jingles. Dave Crane is a fucking genius, right? His IQ is off the charts! Ed Bogas is another one. The day he came in to do the music for me, he composed four different sets of music while having a conversation with me. He said ‘give me the translation paper’ and then he memorized it and gave me the notes in hex. While creating four other pieces of music. That’s probably the person with the most bandwidth, the most simultaneous processing I ever saw.”

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