How to port Pitfall 2 to the Apple IIe. Image: not Pitfall 2.
Retro Thing has posted the second part of their exhaustive interview with Rex Bradford, former Activision programmer and creator of the unreleased Kabobber for the Atari 2600. It's a joy of an interview to read for the retro-gamer. Here's Bradford describing the porting of Pitfall II to the Apple II, then following it up with a casual name dropping of his work on Looking Glass' Terra Nova and System Shock: two of my favorite games ever.
My involvement with Pitfall II was as the sole coder for the Apple-II version of the game. When I "ported" games in those days, the games were simple enough that the procedure was to throw the source code into a drawer, boot up the game, play it a lot, and then recreate it. That process worked quite well then, though would be highly impractical with today's huge games. I had very little involvement with System Shock - I was working on what became Terra Nova at that point - though I wrote several shared libraries that the game used.
Retrospective: Kabobber for the Atari 2600 (Part 2 - Interview) [Retro Thing]
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TerraNova == the bomb.