In 1985, Sega licensed Pitfall II from Activision and turned it into an arcade game – one of, if not the first, console games to receive this treatment. Sega didn’t just make a prettier port of the original, though. They added things from the original Pitfall!, plus a lot of original touches of their own. It’s like they took the best of the first two games, threw them into a blender, then added their own unique touches. The end result was Pitfall II: The Lost Caverns.
Unlike the original Pitfall II, Harry has to find the three keys that will let him locate the hidden three treasures: a crystal ball, a diamond and a crown. You start on the surface, swinging on vines over the crocodile swamps and lava pits, dodging logs, fireballs, spiked balls and evil apples & acorns that fall from very happy looking trees, caterpillars that move up and down, and bolts of lightning. In some cases, you also have to jump across floating logs in the swamps before they sink, and there are even some areas that require you to jump from vine to vine before you reach safety. At one point you have to go down into the caverns, and the ladder down is guarded by a giant crocodile-man statue that spits fire at you.
Below the surface are even more hazards. The scorpions have returned, along with the bats, electric eels and poison arrow frogs. New obstacles include ravens (which have replaced condors), falling stalactites, icy ponds, pairs of poison arrows, giant spike beds, and brick walls that descend and try to crush Harry. Returning from the original Pitfall! are the tar pits that open and close. A new addition is the mine carts. Harry can ride in them, but they can (and will) come to a sudden stop if they hit a barricade. The only way to exit one is to jump and grab one of the many rings scattered around, hanging from the ceilings. Harry can hang from these rings as long as necessary, and can even use them to jump into other mine carts.
Minor treasures like money bags, gold bars and crystals are found scattered throughout the caverns, along with gold goblets and treasure chests. The balloons make a return appearance, and even more importantly are actually needed to get the final treasure and finish the game. The timer and life counter have returned from the original Pitfall!, which means that there are no more red crosses to be had. You lose a life if you collide with a creature or an obstacle. The timer is no longer set for twenty minutes, but three. Completing a stage will bring the timer back up to three minutes. The map is roughly the same size as it was in the original 2600 Pitfall II, but here it’s divided into four levels. This means that if you get to the end of one level, you start at the beginning of the next one, and can’t go back although the end and start points are actually close to one another.
The ending, unfortunately, is nothing to write home about. You get a short congratulatory message, and the game urges you to try again. To its credit, the game looks and sounds great. Harry is now wearing a definable outfit, including black shoes, purple jacket and a purple hat. Everything has an appropriately bright and colorful look, and as you go down into the caverns, the backgrounds take on more of a Mayan style, with large wall murals and brick layouts a lot like what were discovered in Mayan ruins. The Pitfall II theme plays during the game, and it’s never sounded better. However, due to the addition of the timer and lives counter, the game is also very difficult.
Pitfall II: The Lost Caverns received exactly one port, to the Sega SG-1000, on Sega’s MyCard format. While it looks, plays and sounds nicely for the era and the console, it’s very much a bare-bones port. Most of the new stuff added to the arcade is simply gone, and the graphics are simplified. The biggest thing it carries over from the arcade is the difficulty, which may be a bit more crushing than the original.
One thing worth mentioning about the SG-1000 port is that it received two releases. Due to the incompatibility of the color palettes between the SG-1000 and the Sega Mark III, the original release doesn’t display some colors properly if played on the Mark III. Harry, for example, doesn’t have his original flesh tone. Instead, it’s a dark brown that blends in with some of the backgrounds. The re-release adjusted the colors properly. The only real way to tell the two versions apart by looking at the MyCards is to look for extra copyright info on the label. That’s the re-release.
Harry had one more trip to make into the Lost Caverns. But this time, it was more like a trip to Hell (literally).
Screenshot Comparisons
Arcade
SG-1000
