Pitfall! Creator David Crane Seeks $950K to Kickstart JungleVenture

[Jason]

LAS VEGAS â€" Thirty years later, Pitfall! papa David Crane is heading back into the jungle.

“People say, ‘Hey, it’s the 30th anniversary, you should do Pitfall! 3,’” Crane told Wired. “And I say, ‘I can’t. Activision owns it.’”
Although David Crane co-founded Activision in 1979, he hasn’t been associated with the giant game publisher in decades. So he’s proposing the next best thing. At the Classic Gaming Expo this weekend in Las Vegas, Crane will announce a Kickstarter drive for JungleVenture, a spiritual successor to the groundbreaking action game that made him famous. Crane will seek $950,000 in funding, hoping that gamers will get excited about the prospect of the legendary game designer creating a new action game with a familiar premise. He hopes to ship the game in December 2013.

On Friday, Activision published its own Pitfall! game for iOS, produced without Crane’s involvement.
Crane has grander ambitions for his follow-up. He currently plans to create JungleVenture using the Unity game engine, creating a polygonal world with side-scrolling gameplay.

“It’s not going to be a 3-D chase through the jungle in first person,” he says, “largely because of budget constraints. You can spend 10 to 20 million dollars on those kinds of games, and that’s not what we’re going for here.”

“Imagine you’re in a fabulous living breathing jungle but the path happens to be left or right across the screen,” he says. “You might move in 3-D at certain times; there may be some first-person segments.”

Crane says he has a design that will allow JungleVenture to be produced for under $1 million. If the Kickstarter drive raises extra money, Crane says he will be adding extra features to the game design, which is currently still in the “conceptual” stage.

“It does pay homage to the games people know me for: easy to pick up and understand but still very compelling,” he says. “I like to teach people the skills they need in a game before they need them, and work them into it gently. By the end, you know everything you have to do to complete the adventure.”

Long recognized as a pioneer in the gaming industry, David Crane fought for game designers to be treated like novel authors or film directors. When their superiors at Atari refused to credit them for their work, Crane and his fellow designers quit and formed Activision, the first third-party game publisher. Since then, he has continued to design and program games, most recently a slew of iPhone and browser-based casual titles for the companies Skyworks and AppStar.

“This has always been my calling,” Crane says of creating games. “How do I say this without sounding too arrogant? I’m good at it. There’s nobody in the business who’s been in it as long as I have who still writes the code. The code is what brings the game to life.”

The game will be produced by a new San Francisco-based outfit called JungleVenture, Inc, which also includes three former Viacom/Nickelodeon executives: John vanSuchtelen, former vice president of AddictingGames; David Bergantino, former Nickelodeon VP of digital production and game writer; and graphic designer Bill Wentworth.

The new company will produce the game for the Mac and PC platforms to start, but Crane has an eye on creating versions for smartphones and tablets if the Kickstarter drive raises enough money.

While Crane says JungleVenture may attempt to raise development funds through more traditional means if the Kickstarter does not meet its goal, he would much prefer to have the direct connection between the player and the creator that crowdfunding allows.

“A lot of people think of Kickstarter as being only a place where indie developers get a chance to do something a publisher will never let them do, but I don’t see it that way,” he says.

“What I want to do is reach the game players directly, let them decide what games they want and from what team. Voting by backing projects, instead of leaving it up to some publisher’s boardroom,” Crane says. “When you when you take a project like this one to a publisher, they’re going to have creative control, control over the budget.”

“The backers of my Kickstarter project are going to be people who say, ‘I want to see what David Crane can do with full creative control.’”

Source: Wired.com

[Jason]

I loved Pitfall and Pitfall 2. IMO, they were the BEST games created for the Atari 2600. I'd love to see what David Crane can do with JungleVenture

[BDSooner72]

I loved Pitfall and Pitfall 2. IMO, they were the BEST games created for the Atari 2600. I'd love to see what David Crane can do with JungleVenture

I was pretty good at Pitfall, had my high score published in some gaming mag. That said Pitfall was not the best game on the Atari, at least for me.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lq14_yY_3bA#ws