Jack Black's first on-screen appearance was at age 13, wearing a pith helmet to sell Pitfall on television. This episode follows the game's creator, David Crane, from writing profitable Atari 2600 titles like Outlaw and Canyon Bomber, to being told by Atari president Ray Kassar that programmers deserved no credit, to walking out in 1979 to co-found Activision, the world's first third-party game developer.

We explore Crane's three-year obsession with animating a realistic running man on hardware with 128 bytes of RAM and no frame buffer, the ten-minute design session inspired by Raiders of the Lost Ark that produced Pitfall Harry, and the polynomial counter that generated 255 screens in under 50 bytes. We also cover the crocodile heads borrowed from Heckle and Jeckle cartoons, the jump timing grace period, the colleagues who forced him to ra ...