Pitfall!

Pitfall! is a 1982 platform video game developed by David Crane for the Atari 2600 and published by Activision, in which the player guides the explorer Pitfall Harry through a jungle in search of treasure against a twenty-minute time limit. ¹³ The player starts with 2,000 points and can collect a total of 32 treasures hidden among 255 scenes, ranging from a money bag worth 2,000 points to a diamond ring worth 5,000 points. ¹³ It is widely credited with launching or defining the platform game genre. ³¹³¹⁷

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. ¹³ The player begins with three lives and loses one on sinking into quicksand, swamps, or tar pits, or on being hit by a scorpion, cobra rattler, or crocodile; points are lost from lesser hazards such as falling down a hole or colliding with rolling logs. ¹³ Unlike side-scrolling games, Pitfall! loads one screen at a time, a new screen appearing when Harry reaches the edge, an approach the authors of Racing the Beam compared to Atari’s earlier Superman (1979) and Adventure (1980). ¹³ The game also contains an underground passage that lets the player move forward more rapidly, though it is often blocked by walls, giving the jungle a layered, exploratory character rather than a simple left-to-right run. ¹⁴

Development

The game was created and programmed by David Crane, one of four former Atari programmers — with Alan Miller, Bob Whitehead, and Larry Kaplan — who founded Activision in 1979 as a software-only company supplying entertainment products for other companies’ hardware. ⁵ The notion of a software-only firm was unusual at the time, when a buyer wanting a game for the 2600 had to get it from Atari and one wanting a game for Intellivision had to get it from Mattel; Levy later credited Activision with proving the approach worked and, in his words, “creating an industry.” ⁵ Crane relished the technical challenge of the 2600, whose games had to fit graphics, gameplay, sound, and scoring into just 4,096 bytes of memory. ⁶ His design philosophy was to first conceive a clever technical achievement and then build a game around it. ⁶

The central hurdle was “the little running man,” a realistic-looking human walking animation Crane had developed in 1979 before he had a game that needed it, a rarity at a time when games controlled tanks, jet planes, and Pong paddles rather than animated figures. ⁶ For three years he tested the character in scenarios such as a “cops and robbers” game before shelving it. ⁶ In 1982, between games, he sat down with a blank sheet of paper, drew a stick figure on a path, placed the path in a jungle, and added treasures to collect and enemies to avoid — a process he said took about ten minutes, followed by roughly 1,000 hours of programming. ⁶ In that era, Crane said, developers spent “90 per cent of our time writing the last ten per cent of the game.” ⁶

Crane cited the 1981 film Raiders of the Lost Ark as an influence on the design, with a further nod to Tarzan in the swinging vines. ⁶ The alligator-heads sequence came from the cartoon magpies Heckle and Jekyll, who ran across alligator jaws to escape; leaping across the heads became Crane’s favorite aspect, and he tweaked the code so that a small window after the jump button let players direct Harry’s leap, changing the gameplay from “nearly impossible to an easily learned skill.” ⁶ Harry’s world is a circular path 254 screens in circumference; because the 4K ROM could not hold both the character frames and 254 screen definitions, Crane wrote an algorithm that defined every screen mathematically in under 50 bytes. ⁶

Reception and sales

Pitfall! was among the best-selling Atari 2600 cartridges, and IGN listed it among the console’s top ten sellers, calling it “largely believed to have launched the platformer genre in 1982” and “a masterpiece of gameplay.” ³ Activision president James Levy said in 1984 that it was the company’s best-selling product, with over three and a half million units sold worldwide, placing it among the five or six best-selling games in history to that point; it was one of five Activision titles to pass a million units, alongside Laser Blast, Kaboom, Freeway, and River Raid. ⁵ Levy noted that Activision was the only company of its size to create all of its work from scratch without licensing concepts from the arcades, a “hit ratio” he attributed to talent and to distribution reach. ⁵ Later accounts placed sales at over four million copies. ¹⁴¹⁶

The game was released on April 20, 1982, created by David Crane and published by Activision, and later ported to systems including the MSX. ¹⁴¹⁷ Contemporary critics praised its gameplay and graphics, and it has since been ranked among the greatest video games of all time. ¹³ The game has been included in various Activision compilation releases and hidden as a secret extra in later Activision-published titles. ¹³ The authors of Racing the Beam, Nick Montfort and Ian Bogost, characterized it as a platformer. ¹³

Legacy

Pitfall! is described as arguably the first console-originated game — as opposed to one from the arcades or computers — to become a genuine hit, and as having created the side-scrolling platformer with a large world extending beyond the bounds of the television. ¹⁴ Although it originated the flip-screen platformer, it retained something of an arcade mindset in its strict twenty-minute timer and limited lives, functioning like an arcade game that required no quarters. ¹⁴ Its influence carried into the side-scrolling platformers that followed; one account credits it with paving the way for later classics such as Metroid, Castlevania, and Super Mario Bros. ¹⁶

Crane followed it with Pitfall II: Lost Caverns in 1984, in which Pitfall Harry descends into caverns beneath Machu Picchu to recover the Raj diamond, rescue his niece Rhonda and his pet mountain lion Quickclaw, and retrieve gold bars stolen from Fort Knox. ¹⁴ The sequel added a full in-game soundtrack — on the 2600 via an add-on chip called the DPC, for Display Processor Chip — vertical scrolling, an interconnected maze-like world approaching an open-world structure, and a checkpoint system in place of a strict timer, anticipating design ideas that predate Super Mario Bros. ¹⁴ Where the original was built for an arcade-style loop, Pitfall II was, in one assessment, “completely at home on console” and would have been lost in the arcade, allowing players to fail and retry freely while chasing a maximum score of 199,000. ¹⁴

The name itself derives from a much older sense: a pitfall was originally a concealed hole or covered pit prepared as a trap for people or animals, a usage first recorded in Middle English in the early fourteenth century, from pit plus the Old English fealle, meaning “trap.” ¹⁸²²