Pitfall!

In the Atari 2600 original, Pitfall Harry swings over a pit.

The player controls Pitfall Harry through 255 horizontally connected screens of jungle[1] in an attempt to recover 32 treasures in a 20-minute time period.[2] Along the way, players must maneuver around pits, quicksand, rolling logs, fire, rattlesnakes, scorpions, and crocodiles. Harry may jump over or otherwise avoid these obstacles by climbing, running, or swinging on vines.

Treasure consists of bags of money, gold and silver bars, and diamond rings, which range in value from 2,000 to 5,000 points. There are eight of each treasure type. The player begins the game with three lives and a score of 2,000 points; a perfect score of 114,000 is achieved by collecting all 32 treasures without losing any points by falling into holes or touching logs.

Running under every screen is an underground tunnel, which Harry can access by climbing down ladders or falling into holes. Traveling through the tunnel moves Harry forward three screens at a time, which is necessary to collect the treasures within the time limit.[3] However, the tunnels can be blocked by brick walls, forcing the player to return to the surface to find a way around. The tunnels also contain scorpions. The player loses a life if Harry comes in contact with any obstacle (except logs) or falls into a tar pit, quicksand, waterhole, or mouth of a crocodile. The game ends when either all 32 treasures have been collected, all three lives have been lost, or the time has run out.

Pitfall! was created by David Crane, a programmer who worked for Activision in the early 1980s. In a November 2003 interview with Edge, he described how in 1979 he had developed the technology to display a realistic running man and in 1982 was searching for a suitable game in which to use it:

I sat down with a blank sheet of paper and drew a stick figure in the center. I said, "Okay, I have a little running man and let's put him on a path [two more lines drawn on the paper]. Where is the path? Let's put it in a jungle [draw some trees]. Why is he running [draw treasures to collect, enemies to avoid, etc.]?" And Pitfall! was born. This entire process took about ten minutes. About 1,000 hours of programming later, the game was complete.

The game uses non-flickering, multicolored, animated sprites on a system with notoriously primitive graphics hardware. To fit the game on a 4096 byte ROM, a polynomial counter generates the 255 screens within 50 bytes of code. The swinging vines are created by repeatedly displaying a one pixel wide sprite at different offsets.[4]

ColecoVision Pitfall!

Pitfall! was released on August 20, 1982.[5] When the game was originally sold, anyone who scored above 20,000 points could send Activision a picture of their television screen to receive a Pitfall Harry Explorer Club patch.[6] The television commercial for Pitfall! featured then-child actor Jack Black at age 13 in his first TV role.[7]

Pitfall! for the Atari 2600 was the best-selling home video game from late 1982 to the first quarter of 1983.[13] By mid-January 1983, it had been the top-selling game on the Billboard chart for seven weeks—much more successful than E.T., which Atari had paid $21 million to license[14]—and remained in the number one position for 64 weeks in a row.[15] The game sold 1 million units in five months,[16][17] and went on to sell over 3.5 million units by 1984.[18] It is one of the best-selling games on the Atari 2600, with over four million copies sold as of 2008.[19][20] All versions of the game sold over 5 million copies worldwide, as of 1998.[21]

Danny Goodman of Creative Computing Video & Arcade Games stated that Pitfall! was "a standout" among the dozens of 2600 games announced at the summer 1982 Consumer Electronics Show, a "very original cartridge no VCS should be without".[22] Arcade Express reviewed the Atari 2600 version of Pitfall! in August 1982, stating that it "may well be the best adventure game yet produced for the VCS" and giving it a score of 8 out of 10.[9] Electronic Games in June 1983 praised the 2600 version's "superb graphics and varied play-action".[13]

Goodman was surprised that the Intellivision version's graphics had not greatly improved on the 2600's.[22] Video Games in March 1983 criticized Activision for not enhancing the Intellivision version's graphics: "We all know you can do more with graphics on Intellivision than on the VCS. So why no improvements in Pitfall?"[23]

The 2600 version of Pitfall! was awarded "Best Adventure Video Game" at the 4th annual Arkie Awards.[24]^: 108 In 1995, Flux magazine ranked the game 33rd on their "Top 100 Video Games."[25] Game Informer placed the game 41st on their top 100 video games of all time in 2001.[26] In 2004, Pitfall! was inducted into GameSpot's list of the greatest games of all time.[27] In 2013 Entertainment Weekly listed it as one of the ten best Atari 2600 games.[28]

Pitfall! is considered one of the most influential games for the Atari 2600 system.[28] It is a prototypical side-scrolling platform game, a genre which would dominate future 8-bit and 16-bit systems, and introduced features that would be common in future platform games, such as the ability to travel up and down on multiple levels of play.[29][2][28]

Both Pitfall! and its sequel Pitfall II: Lost Caverns have been included as playable easter eggs in several Call of Duty titles, such as Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War and Call of Duty: WWII.[30][31][32]

• Pitfall! at MobyGames
• Pitfall! at AtariAge
• Legends of the C64 article on David Crane and Activision (includes Pitfall! info)
• The Atari 2600 version of Pitfall! can be played for free in the browser at the Internet Archive
• Pitfall map and solution
• Pitfall assembly source code