Pitfall!

Pitfall Harry swinging over a pit in Pitfall! The score and timer can be seen in the top corner while an enemy scorpion can be seen on the lower platform cave area.

Pitfall! is a video game set in a jungle where the player controls Pitfall Harry, a fortune hunter and explorer.[2][3] Pitfall! has been described as a platform game by Nick Montfort and Ian Bogost, authors of Racing the Beam.[4] Similar to Superman (1979) and Adventure (1980), the game does not feature side-scrolling, but instead loads one screen at a time, with a new screen appearing when Harry moves to the edge.[4] The goal is to get Harry as many points as possible within a twenty-minute time limit. The player starts the game with 2000 points and can collect a total of 32 treasure hidden among 255 different scenes to increase their total, ranging from a money bag worth 2000 points, to a diamond ring worth 5000 points.[2]

Pitfall Harry moves left and right and can jump over and onto objects, swing from vines, and climb up and down ladders to seek treasure and avoid danger. The player can also lose points from hazards, such as falling down a hole or colliding with rolling logs. The player starts with three lives and can lose one if they are hit by a scorpion, cobra rattler, crocodile or sink into quicksand, swamps or tar pits.[2]

Pitfall! was developed by David Crane, for Activision.[2] Crane had previously worked at Atari, Inc. in the late 1970s developing games for the Atari Video Computer System, later released as the Atari 2600.[5] The system became known as the Atari 2600 after the release of the Atari 5200 in 1982.[6] After discovering the high profits Atari had made for games he developed such as Outlaw, Canyon Bomber and Slot Machine, he asked the president of Atari Ray Kassar for recognition on their titles and more pay.[7] When he was turned down, Crane and other Atari programmers left the company to form Activision in 1979.[8] Crane was the senior designer at Activision and created Dragster, Fishing Derby, Laser Blast, Freeway and Grand Prix for the company prior to the release of Pitfall![2]

Crane described his own game-design philosophy involved making the Atari 2600 do new and unexpected things. Crane said he "used this technique to lead me in a new direction of game design, and some of the tricks were to me as much as an accomplishment as solving the Rubik's Cube the first time".[9] Early development of Pitfall! started with Crane trying to create realistically animated graphics on the Atari 2600.[4] This led to developing a moving man which became the basis of Pitfall Harry and, later, the scorpions and snake obstacles.[10] For three years, Crane experimented using the running-man character in different scenarios such as a cops and robbers game but could not find a proper situation for it.[11] Crane began implementing it into a game in 1982.[10] Crane stated having the running man animation led to putting him on a path, which led to placing the path in a jungle and giving the man a reason to run in order to hunt treasures and avoid enemies.[12] The jungle setting of the game was influenced by the 1981 film Raiders of the Lost Ark.[13] Other influences came from Heckle and Jeckle cartoons, where the two magpies outwitted their enemies, including having the magpies run across the heads of crocodiles and just escaping their snapping jaws.[13] This led to the ability of Pitfall Harry being able to cross ponds infested with crocodiles if their jaws were closed.[14] Initially, to jump from one alligator head to another, the player had to move the joystick and jump at exactly the same time which Crane described as being "almost impossible to play. So I changed the code to allow you to direct Harry’s jump to the side, if you moved the joystick within a small instant from the time you pressed the button to jump. From a programming standpoint this was a tiny change, but it changed the gameplay from nearly impossible to an easily learned skill."[11] Crane tried to make the sprite artwork for obstacles and the environment recognizable to players, despite the limitations of the Atari 2600. The process involved what Crane said was "a lot of trial-and-error".[15]

Crane commented that "The entire [game design] process took about 10 minutes. About 1000 hours of programming later the game was complete."[12] Much of Crane's time was spent optimizing and compressing the code so that it would fit into a four kilobyte ROM cartridge.[16] Unlike Haunted House (1982) or Raiders of the Lost Ark (1982) where the environments were hard-coded into the game, Pitfall! was generated constantly by code.[14] The game's code used an algorithm to generate each screen based on a counter that could run either backwards or forwards depending which direction the player moved from screen to screen.[17] Each number in the counter used 8 bits to load certain details such as the background, trees, ground and object patterns, allowing 255 screens to occupy fewer than 50 bytes of ROM.[18] Activision had created design centers for their games, which were small, close-knit teams of four to five people working together.[19] This led to teams encouraging peer reviews and sharing prototypes of games. In Pitfall!, Crane's team changed the initial amount of lives in the game from one to three during the final week of development.[20] Crane said that "my buddies practically tied me to my chair until I put in extra lives and I'm glad they did".[20]

Pitfall! was released for the Atari 2600 in September 1982.[21] The game was later released for the Intellivision in November 1982.[22] To promote the game, Activision created a five-week long promotion on November 15, 1982, and ending December 13, 1982 in various markets across the United States for a chance to win $5,000 in gold.[23]

In January 1984, it was announced that Pitfall! would be released along with other Acitivision titles such as River Raid, Megamania, and Beamrider for the Atari 5200, ColecoVision, Commodore 64, and MSX.[24][25][26][27] Pitfall! was subsequently released for the Colecovision in February, the Atari Computer and Atari 5200 in March, and the Commodore 64 in June.[28][29][30] It was released in Japan for the MSX computer in September 1984.[31]

Pitfall! was included in various video games collections. These include Activision Classics (1998) for the PlayStation, Activision Anthology (2002) for PlayStation 2 and for portable devices as Activision Hits Remixed in 2006 for the PlayStation Portable.[26] The game was also a secret extra in Activision published titles such as Pitfall: The Mayan Adventure (1994), Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare (2016) and Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War (2020).[32][33][34]

In contemporary reviews, reviewers praised the gameplay and graphics in publications like Arcade Express and Electronic Fun with Computers & Games, with the former publication stating that it "may well be the best adventure game yet produced for the VCS".[36][42] In Blip, the reviewer stated that the game was similar to Donkey Kong (1981), but that "this is one case where inspiration didn't lead to imitation. Pitfall is its own game. It's also a heck of a lot of fun.[43] In JoyStik How to Win at Video Games, the game was awarded five stars and listed in their top ten games of the year in January 1983.[40][44] The Atari 2600 version of Pitfall! was awarded "Best Adventure Video Game" at the 4th annual Arkie Awards in 1983.[45]

Reviewing the Intellivision version in March 1983, Phil Wiswell wrote in Video Games that it was the same game in every aspect as the Atari 2600 version, but criticized the release for not taking advantage enough of Intellivision's graphical capabilities.[46] Electronic Games in their "1983 Software Encyclopedia" issue gave it a seven out of ten rating for the Intellivision, noting that the game "requires more arcade-type skills than intuition or logic".[39]

Pitfall! was the highest selling video game from late 1982 to the first quarter of 1983.[47] The game sold 1 million units in 1982.[48] It held the top spot on the Top Video Games Billboard charts for 64 consecutive weeks.[5] It went on to sell over 3.5 million units by 1984.[49] It is one of the best-selling games on the Atari 2600, with over four million copies sold as of 2008.[50] All versions of the game sold over 5 million copies worldwide, as of 1998.[51]

David Crane in 2013

Pitfall! was described by authors Montfort and Bogost in Racing the Beam as an important early platform game, a game genre made famous by Super Mario Bros. (1985).[4] They declared that unlike other Atari 2600 games, Pitfall! offered a much longer game compared to previous Atari games which were either ports of arcade games which were designed to be shorter experience in order to gain more coins from the player, or games such as Adventure which could be beaten in about two minutes.[56] The authors stated that Pitfall! built upon the graphic adventure game genre of Adventure to create an experience similar to open world games in which a game presents a world that cannot be contemplated all at once and offered a variety of actions built upon a few core game play options.[57] Jeff Gerstman of GameSpot spoke similarly in 2004 when including Pitfall! in GameSpot's "Greatest Games of All Time" list, stating that the game was "responsible for launching the platformer genre as we know it" and that "Despite the fact that platformers have become a lot more sophisticated, especially since video games in general made the shift to 3D, it's surprising how little the fundamentals--like jumping around, avoiding enemies and obstacles, and collecting stuff--have changed since Pitfall!"[58]

Unlike Mario or Pac-Man who originated in arcade games, Pitfall Harry was the first popular video game character originating in home consoles.[13] The character was featured on licensed merchandise and led to Pitfall Harry appearing on the cartoon show Saturday Supercade which aired from 1983 to 1985 on CBS.[59] Pitfall Harry's character was not included in the second season.[60]

• List of Activision games: 1980–1999
• List of ColecoVision games
• List of Intellivision games
• List of MSX games

• Pitfall! at MobyGames
• Pitfall! at AtariAge
• Legends of the C64 article on David Crane and Activision (includes Pitfall! info)
• Pitfall map and solution
• Pitfall assembly source code