“Pitfall 2 : Rumble In The Jungle” was developed as a Nintendo Gameboy Colour game in the Pitfall franchise for Activision.

Unfortunately the game never made it to market even though it was pretty far along. The development of the game sprang out of an earlier development of several ports of classic Atari 2600 games that I was working on. The games were meant to be released as an anthology pack but that never happened and I hadn’t quite learnt my lesson as to just how messed up Activision was becoming. I pushed ahead with developing Rumble In The Jungle but after much screwing around by the publisher I had to conclude that this game was never going to see the light of day.

I did manage to create a versatile level editor though. Below is a screenshot of the editor running in “2600 mode” that let me use it to re-create original Pitfall 2 levels. The editor is actually capable of creating more advanced levels than those found in the original Pitfall 2, along with being able to re-generate the original Atari 2600 Pitfall 2 ROM with new level data.

I did intend to release the new levels as brand new games for free, on the ‘net, but never found the time to create a game engine that could use the data, all I was able to do was create a ROM hack of the original Pitfall 2. Time, there is never enough of it. *heavy sigh*

— Justin Lloyd

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