Dream and Friends

Do you like roms? I like roms. Have a rom. It’s Activision’s unreleased Super Pitfall II.

Super Pitfall II was a planned localization of Atlantis no Nazo, a Sunsoft-developed platformer that, thankfully, is completely unrelated to the original (and god-awful) Super Pitfall.

Atlantis no Nazo is kind of awesome. It has terrible controls, and any expert playthrough you watch will be mostly inexplicable, but once you get a sense of how the game’s logic works, it’s actually a whole lot of fun to play.

It’s also really weird and mysterious, which is what I love most about it. Atlantis no Nazo is full of hidden secrets, balance-breaking power-ups, and obscure warp zones. Some of the game’s biggest secrets require you to commit suicide, explore outside of the screen’s borders, or chuck bombs at nondescript background tiles.

It’s not for everyone, sure, but I like it a lot. The changes made to the unreleased North American version make the whole thing even more interesting.

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I had lots of prototypes and unreleased stuff I wanted to talk about on this site eventually, but before I could get around to any of them, my good buddy Frank Cifaldi discovered the holy mother of them all — Bio Force Ape.

Frank and the Retronauts crew at 1UP played through the game — live and in full — in an episode of Game Night earlier this week, which you can now watch in slightly abridged form:

– Part 1, in which Jeremy Parish wrestles with an ape
– Part 2, featuring the best enemy character in history at 6:40
– Part 3, in which the game takes a sadistic turn
– Part 4, edited to remove ten minutes of monkeys falling off conveyor belts

Frank and company do a good job of explaining the game’s insane history, so I won’t bother prefacing it. Just know that this is something that you need to watch, if you’re at all interested in bizarre unreleased video games, stories of triumph against impossible odds, or mangaroos.