Curmudgeon Gamer...such luminaries as Chopper Command (fly a chopper and shoot stuff), Barnstorming (pilot a biplane through a bunch of barns), Boxing (uh...box!), Plaque Attack (fire toothpaste at incoming food to protect the teeth, Space Invaders style), and the aforementioned seminal side-scrolling precursor Pitfall.Wrong. Being a side-scroller would require, oddly enough, scrolling, often from side-to-side.
Perhaps you meant platformer? That'd make sense.
Also, the game is Pitfall!, with an exclamation point.
Update: Ok, I get it. The wording means "precursor to side-scrollers". Perhaps "proto-side-scroller" or something similar, to avoid making it sound like Pitfall! itself is side-scrolling.
We can see what they're trying to write, but they're not writing it correctly. They're calling it a side-scrolling precursor, that can only mean a precursor that scrolls to the side. They might have wanted to say "side-scroller precursor" instead, but that's doesn't particularly trip off the tongue.
By 
JohnH, at
10 October, 2006 00:50
Ha, no, worse than that, it's the seminal side scroller precursor.
Aren't seminal and precursor implicitly oxymoronic? "The first that came immediately before!"
By rufbo, at
10 October, 2006 03:26
They shouldn't try to describe the gameplay just by referencing the display technique. Side scroller would refer to the presentation, rather than the gameplay.
A game could be a side scrolling platformer, or like Pitfall! based on static screens (don't know if that method has a name or not). Shooters are a different genre from platformers, yet they can certainly be side scrollers too.
Not that I'd expect someone writing a press release to be even remotely aware of such distinctions about what they're hawking.
By BruceC, at
13 October, 2006 14:17
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