Overexposure to scorpions, maybe

Back in the Pleistocene era, I had one of Mattel's Intellivision consoles with the infamous disc controllers. The discs had good motion but just didn't compare to real joysticks, and in a week or so I'd scored a couple of plastic joystick tops that epoxied to the discs, killing the system's presumed resale value but adding serious win to my gameplay.

And one day, feeling full of myself, I connected the gamebox to the Betamax, fired up Activision's Pitfall!, and twisted and twirled and jumped all the way to the final screen. For a couple of years I showed the tape to anyone who was interested and rather a lot of people who weren't.

I had, of course, no idea that Pitfall Harry himself was something of a bad egg, or I would never have worked so closely with him.

Posted at 2:34 PM to Bogus History