A Classic Reborn With Advanced Graphics

The original Pitfall!, released in 1982 for the Atari 2600, ignited enthusiasm over a new genre of video games: the side-scroller. Its 255 screens delivered an entertainment experience that differed from anything available at the time, as players were free to roam around the forbidden jungle searching for treasure and avoiding perilous obstacles. Believe it or not, that cult classic ran on a platform that boasted a 1.19MHz processor and 128 bytes of RAM!

Now, picture a game with the same premise, utilizing today’s advanced graphics processors, and yielding a third dimension of freedom. Pitfall: The Lost Expedition marks Pitfall Harry’s return as a courageous treasure-hunter in a race against a rival explorer to uncover riches in a Peruvian jungle. There are plenty of vines to swing across, obstacles to avoid, new adversaries to overcome, and a barrage of equipment for Harry to use along the way. And this time, you’ll be swimming, ice climbing, sneaking past napping howler monkeys, and fighting, when the opportunity presents itself.

Pitfall: The Lost Expedition actually started out as a console game for Microsoft’s Xbox, and the game’s controls seem to be very much geared toward console play. Fortunately, the game includes a configuration utility for keyboard remapping, game pad setup, and specifying graphics options. According to Glenda Adams, director of PC and Mac development at Aspyr Media, part of porting Pitfall to the PC meant enabling a host of resolutions (up to 1600x1200) and a lot of those configurable detail settings that just aren’t possible on a fixed console platform.

Thanks to the flexibility of NVIDIA’s GeForce 6-series graphics processors, Aspyr infuses the PC version of the game with enhanced graphics detail, specifically with regard to Shader Model 3.0 support. Aspyr’s Adams claims the most readily noticeable improvements are to the rendered water. And Harry sees a lot of water as he traverses through the Peruvian jungle.

“What we did specifically with Shader Model 3.0 technology, was that we took advantage of the texture displacement mapping feature so that when we draw the water textures, they’re actually using a reference back into the texture data on the fly to the shader to modify vertex positions. So, we can basically make the ripples and waves in the water much more realistic. As you’re swimming through the water, ripples propagate from your character and you can see the water lapping up against the river bank.”

So, Pitfall exploits the vertex texture lookup feature of Shader Model 3.0 to perform displacement mapping through shaders. Moreover, there is no fallback for that feature and as a result cards that don’t support Shader Model 3.0 simply won’t render the game’s enhanced water. Rather, the option to “enable high-res water” will be unavailable on those systems. According to Aspyr, performance on non-Shader Model 3.0 platforms is simply prohibitive to rendering the detailed water. Pitfall’s other features, such as full scene anti-aliasing and detailed shadows do function properly on all graphics processors fast enough to run with them enabled, however.

In addition to its performance ramifications, Shader Model 3.0 allowed Aspyr Media to quickly bring Pitfall: The Lost Expedition to PC gamers in an improved state. And because platforms that don’t support Shader Model 3.0 won’t render Pitfall to its full potential, NVIDIA’s GeForce 6-series effectively offers more performance and better visual quality than competing graphics architectures.

Though Pitfall doesn’t aspire to be an ultra-realistic romp through the jungle (the characters and animations are more cartoon-ish than anything else and Aspyr wasn’t looking to change any of those for the PC port), the inclusion of Shader Model 3.0 gives what was once a classic side-scrolling epic a sense of depth that it has never seen. And, on a system with an NVIDIA GeForce 6-series graphics processor, Pitfall: The Lost Expedition will run fast enough to ensure an entertaining gaming experience that’s visually immersing.