Haha, considering this comes from BTFeather, this should not be taken seriously. His opinions mean nothing :P.

That being said DS and SNES and Gamecube are the best systems ever :D

The Atari 2600 should be saluted for what it is/was.

It brought video gaming home to the masses.
It sold 30M units -- without much in Japan.
It lasted from 1977 to 1990.
It made leaps of improvements in graphics (check out Road Runner 1990).

But within two years of its release it was rather primitive (Intellivision, then later Colecovision) and even Atari tried to kill it (Atari 5200).

As for Pitfall, it was hailed as a true technical achievement at its time. But when it appeared on other systems (Intellivision) and was not improved, people wondered about Activision. In other words, the first true porting of a game without improvement was questioned over a quarter century ago.

Mike from Morgantown

Well you are right on one thing BT. I was born too late to play it when it first came out but I had the Atari 2600 first. Didn't get the NES till around 88 or 89. Of course games usually improve in graphics and gameplay over time since they borrow the best ideas from other games. Pitfall might have been amazing when it first came out but Super Mario Bros. is remembered far more than Pitfall.

     In its time Pitfall was clearly better than the original Mario brothers.  I'm not talking about Super Mario Brothers.  I'm talking about the game where one player plays Luigi and one plays Mario and you're trying to stop the turtles from coming out of the pipes.

Uh... this thread is... pretty amazing.

Just dropped in to mention that it doesn't much matter what year a person was born in; at the time, kids got things at different rates anyways, and not everyone was on the "cutting edge."  In my youth, and in my neighborhood, it was enough to know someone with an Atari. :)

My first "game console" (idk what it actually, technically was) was hard-wired to play a few different screens of Pong.  The Atari was amazing compared to that, and something that I wished that I had.

But Super Mario Bros. and the NES?  Blew the Atari out of the water.  No one at the time really thought in terms of graphical power, bits, etc. (or at least I didn't, and neither did anyone I know) -- it was about the fun that you had playing whichever games.  And I don't know of anyone, or really can imagine anyone, who would've put Pitfall above SMB by that standard.

After playing a little bit of even the very first line-up of NES games, I can't imagine any kid choosing instead a 2600.

The SNES is the best system of all time

There you have it folks.  The only way to enjoy Pitfall is to forget about everything that's better.

Scrolling screens is when the screen scrolls.  While you walk.  It didn't do that in Pitfall.  You had to exit one screen to enter another.

And the reason SMB only let you walk in one direction was because it was a linear game with a beginning, middle, and end.  You walked from the beginning on the left, to the end on the right.  This was good.  The game had a story with a villain and somebody to save.

In Pitfall you wander aimlessly to the left or you wander aimlessly to the right, but it's not much of an open world.  There are 2 ways to go, and they are equally lame, with no villain, no princess, no story, no ending.  You're acting like Pitfall somehow paved the way for sandbox games.

     I tried to say earlier that there was much more on the Atari 2600 than just Pitfall.  There was also all of the classic arcade shooters like Vanguard, Defender, Missle Command, Asteroids, Berzerk and more.  Geometry Wars is the direct descendant of Asteroids.  And there are many people that would rather play Geometry Wars on 360 today than either Wii Sports or Mario Galaxy.

I guess you didn't play The Lost Caverns which was a platformer that  had a story with a beginning, middle, and end before that concept was put into Super Mario Brothers.