Pitfall! is a video game developed by David Crane for the Atari 2600 and released in 1982 by Activision. The player controls Pitfall Harry, who has a time limit of 20 minutes to seek treasure in a jungle. The game world is populated by enemies and hazards that variously cause the player to lose lives or points. Crane had made several games for both Atari, Inc. and Activision before working on Pitfall! in 1982. He started with creating a new realistic-style walking animation for a person on the Atari 2600 hardware.
Pitfall! - Atari 2600 version
After completing it, he fashioned a game around it. He used a jungle setting with items to collect and enemies to avoid, and the result became Pitfall!
Pitfall! received mostly positive reviews at the time of its release praising both its gameplay and graphics. The game was influential in the platform game genre and various publications have considered it one of the greatest video games of all time. It is also one of the best-selling Atari 2600 video games. The game was ported to several contemporary video game systems. It has been included in various Activision compilation games and was included as a secret extra in later Activision published titles.
Pitfall! is a video game set in a jungle where the player controls Pitfall Harry, a fortune hunter and explorer. Pitfall! has been characterized as a platformer by Nick Montfort and Ian Bogost, the authors of Racing the Beam. Similar to Superman (1979) and Adventure (1980), the game does not feature side-scrolling and instead loads one screen at a time, with a new screen appearing when the player character, Pitfall Harry, moves to the edge of the screen. The goal is to get Harry as many points as possible within a twenty-minute time limit. The player starts the game with 2,000 points and can collect a total of 32 treasure hidden among 255 scenes to increase their total, ranging from a money bag worth 2,000 points to a diamond ring worth 5,000 points.
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 lose points from hazards, such as falling down a hole or colliding with rolling logs. The player starts with three lives and loses one if they sink into quicksand, swamps or tar pits or are hit by a scorpion, cobra rattler, or crocodile.
Pitfall! is considered one of the most influential games for the Atari 2600 system. 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. 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 and Call of Duty: WWII.
More details about this game can be found on
Wikipedia.org.
Find digital download of this game on
GOG
or
Steam.
Videogame Console:
This version of Pitfall! was designed for Atari 2600, which was commercially very successful video game console of second generation produced by Atari from 1977 to 1992. It was the first console that used removable memory modules with games. At the time of its greatest fame, more than 30 million units of this console were sold for about $ 200 a piece. To date, the game library for this console contains nearly 1,000 original games. More information about the
Atari 2600 can be found here.
Recommended Game Controllers:
You can control this game easily by using the keyboard of your PC (see the table next to the game). However, for maximum gaming enjoyment, we strongly recommend using a USB joystick that you simply plug into the USB port of your computer. If you do not have a joystick, buy a suitable USB controller on Amazon or AliExpress or in some of your favorite online stores.
Available online emulators:
5 different online emulators are available for Pitfall!. These emulators differ not only in the technology they use to emulate old games, but also in support of various game controllers, multiplayer mode, mobile phone touchscreen, emulation speed, absence or presence of embedded ads and in many other parameters. For
maximum gaming enjoyment, it's important to choose the right emulator, because on each PC and in different Internet browsers, the individual emulators behave differently. The basic
features of each emulator available for this game Pitfall! are summarized in the following table:
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This version of Pitfall! was designed for Atari 2600, which was commercially very successful video game console of second generation produced by Atari from 1977 to 1992. It was the first console that used removable memory modules with games. At the time of its greatest fame, more than 30 million units of this console were sold for about $ 200 a piece. To date, the game library for this console contains nearly 1,000 original games. More information about the
Atari 2600 can be found 
