I... don't know QUITE what to make of this one... Well, it was shown at both Philly Classic and the Classic Gaming Expo as Pit-Fighter, so presumably the original board was marked indicating this was Pit-Fighter... however this game bears very little resemblance to the game we all know as Pit-Fighter. It has a few things in common with the arcade game I suppose - you beat people up until they fall, the crowd is cheering you on in the background (albiet in shadow-only, their sprites are not in the game) and the arena sort of looks like something out of Pit-Fighter, but the gameplay isn't anything near how Pit-Fighter played.
It may just be the fact that this was a very early demo of a game that would one day be a 7800 version of Pit-Fighter, but this ROM plays more like a Double Dragon type game than like a Pit-Fighter game. Another oddity is that the game seems to play entirely too fast - almost as if it was playing at double speed. Gameplay, like most Atari 7800 ProSystem games, is simple. You are the guy in the purple pants and you need to beat the shite out of the people in the other colored pants. There's only one level in this game, and when you knock all four of your opponents out, nothing happens - you just continue on like nothings changed. Its not a bad little game, and probably would have been a whole lot better if it was completed.
One fun bug exists in this demo. If you walk all the way to the bottom of the screen and press the JUMP button, your character flies into the air and hangs over the crowd as seen in the picture above. While this may not be the best prototype ever released, it is certainly, from my opinion anyway, one of the most appreciated. When the first reports of an Atari 7800 Pit-Fighter came out after PhillyClassic 2001, there were a lot of questions about the game. Now we all know, just like the people trying to tell us this after they played it at PhillyClassic that this game wasn't much to get excited over. It makes me wonder however - what was the Atari 7800 capable of that we never got to see thanks to the bumbling of the Tramiels?
