Twelve years after its founding in 1966, Japanese media company Pony Canyon decided to enter the video game business in 1982, and for the first few years it exclusively released PC games for the main computers of the era, i.e. the NEC PC-88, the Fujitsu FM-7, the Sharp X1, & the MSX line. Though it had its own original titles, Pony Canyon's main focus came in two forms: Licensed IP & Western games. For the former the company's earlier releases included games based on properties like Spy Daisakusen (the Japanese name for Mission: Impossible), The Cannonball Run II, Genma Taisen (a.k.a. Harmageddon), Xabungle, Golgo 13, Locke the Superman, & Back to the Future; over time they'd focus less on this, however. In comparison, the latter is what would truly define Pony Canyon as a game developer/publisher as in 1984 they started releasing MSX ports of various games from Activision, while in later years they'd also release ports of games from series like Ultima, The Bard's Tale, Test Drive, Ballblazer, & Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. The Activision partnership was especially notable, in particular, as while Pony Canyon more or less stopped making ports after 1988 (Space Shuttle for the MSX looks to be the last one) they would still occasionally act as the Japanese publisher for Activision games all the way through the 90s, mostly notably for entries in the iconic Pitfall series... and that's where one of those infamous NES games I brought up comes into play.
In 1984 Pony Canyon released an MSX port of Pitfall! & in 1985 this was followed up with an MSX port of Pitfall II: Lost Caverns. Now, to be fair, some of these MSX ports also saw release outside of Japan (the line did see some success in Europe & South America), so those ports may not have originated in Japan, but for Pony Canyon's next Pitfall release there was no doubt that it was 100% a Japanese interpretation of a Western IP. Released on September 5, 1986 for the Nintendo Famicom, Super Pitfall was a brand new entry in Activision's platformer-defining franchise, and was the first entry to have not been designed & developed by creator David Crane. Instead, Pony Canyon hired Micronics to develop the game... and the end result was a mess, with even Family Computer Magazine (a.k.a. Famimaga, not to be confused with Famicom Tsushin, i.e. Famitsu) scoring it a mere 17.06/40. Activision would later release Super Pitfall for the NES in North America in November of 1987, where it would gain even more infamy for its poor quality.... well, everything. The visuals were glitchy, the hit detection was inconsistent, the music was repetitive, and the gameplay was simultaneously buggy & way too cryptic for its own good. There would later be a port of the game to the Tandy TRS-80 Color Computer 3 by Steve & Monique Bjork of SRB Software in 1988 which, despite a lower frame rate & a reduced gameplay window, looks to be the superior version in all ways. There was also the fan made Super Pitfall': 30th Anniversary Edition by Mário "nesrocks" Azevedo in 2016 that's just a straight-up, massively improved remake. Activision had even planned on releasing Sunsoft's Atlantis no Nazo internationally as "Super Pitfall II", though the release was cancelled; a prototype ROM for Super Pitfall II would surface in 2010.
But there's one final version of Super Pitfall out there that never left Japan. In November of 1986, only two months after the original Famicom release in Japan, Pony Canyon released Super Pitfall for the PC-88mkII SR. While it's similar in concept to what Micronics made for Nintendo's hardware, the PC-88 game is a wholly unique version, one seemingly developed in-house at Pony Canyon & designed by Makoto Ichinoseki, so let's see if this Japan-only take might possibly be capable of redeeming the name "Super Pitfall" in any way.
