50 Years of Video Games: Pitfall! (Atari 2600)

I wasn’t always the guy who wanted to play every video game ever released. I was still pretty much willing to play any game that came my way if it was released around the time of the NES or after, but the simplistic graphical presentation of games for systems like the Atari 2600 and Colecovision once made me think they had less to offer. Opening myself up to them has lead to me discovering some great old games like Pressure Cooker though and I’ve grown to appreciate what even the simplest experiences can offer no matter how they look. Before I had that change of heart though, I still allowed for the fact that some early games seemed good despite their rudimentary graphical presentations, and one game that I often mentioned as a potential outlier was Activision’s 1982 Atari 2600 game Pitfall!. It’s probably little surprise this game caught my eye, Activision’s commitment to more recognizable character sprites and new game concepts setting it apart on Atari’s system after they established themselves as the first third party developer for a video game console ever in an effort to ensure game creators received proper credit and proportional compensation if a game did well. While their first games were released in 1980, David Crane’s Pitfall! would be the game that caught on like wildfire and helped Activision ensure its spot as a game creator of importance for decades to come.

Pitfall! stars a man dressed in green known as Pitfall Harry, this explorer deciding to seek fortune out in a large and dangerous stretch of jungle. The good news for this intrepid adventurer is that gold, diamond rings, and money bags are scattered throughout this natural area, laying on the ground ready to be picked up by anyone who could come across them. It even seems some adventurers might have been here before, campfires still burning where someone must have left them and a large system of tunnels running underneath the jungle with ladders to help people climb down into them and brick walls blocking off some parts of the subterranean routes. However, Harry seems to only have 20 minutes to do his treasure hunting, the game ending the moment the timer runs out or the player ends up losing the three lives they’re given.

The jungle Pitfall Harry needs to traverse manages to have a large sense of scale even on the humble hardware of the Atari 2600. There is no scrolling in Pitfall!, the player proceeding from one screen to another by taking the exits at the left or right, with each screen containing its own hazards, roadblocks, or treasures. There are 32 treasures to try and grab to up your score, but the jungle itself consists of 255 screens that are all chained together one after the other before the final screen loops back to the first one. Since you can exit a screen from the left or right you can alter your path if you think it will help your treasure hunt, but to cover so much ground in so little time essentially requires you to use the underground tunnels to your advantage. While most things of interest are above ground, the tunnels allow you to skip chunks of the jungle, giving the seemingly straightforward adventure a more exploratory angle. If you want to be able to grab all 32 treasures before time runs out you’ll need to scout out those tunnels and learn where they’ll take you. I did do a test run where I simply ran to the left to see how far I could get in the 20 minutes and actually managed to make it through 170 screens, and since I was being overly cautious to ensure I could get as far as possible, it is likely you can cover even more ground with more daring play. Mixing in some intelligent tunnel taking though definitely makes it possible to grab all the treasures if you are interested in earning the maximum score, part of the experience learning when you should stay above ground and when to travel below but the game not too demanding in making you memorize the entire tunnel system.

Pitfall Harry’s adventure is more exciting than just running through the jungle and traveling through tunnels though. Many dangers lay in his path, but fortunately for Harry, most of them can be handled by jumping the right way. Down in the tunnels scorpions are on patrol, the arachnids about as big as the hero and always slowly shuffling towards him when he’s underground with them. Leaping over a scorpion requires the right timing or you will brush against them and meet your doom, and that manageable but still tight window for success is how Pitfall! makes the adventure more engaging. Harry’s jump is consistent but when you leave the ground is important to leaping over a coiled snake or burning campfire, but it’s the alligators that will likely really test the player. When you come across a screen with them, they’ll always be in a large pond, the only way to cross it in this 2D platform game being to jump across the gators’ mouths when they’re closed. You can rest on their heads safely, but if you hit their open mouths you’ll die and slipping into the water is lethal as well. This segment definitely has the greatest risk of leading to a quick death if you don’t time your jumps well and space them properly, the danger still feeling present on the alligator screens even as you get more and more of a knack for the general movement.

On some screens though a vine will swing back and forth above the gator pond, Pitfall Harry able to grab it and swing across with a silly digitized version of a Tarzan yell to accompany it. Getting on and off isn’t too hard so vines are often a nice relief when they crop up, but they can be helpful hints too. Some screen have large pits that you don’t want to fall into, these described by the game as tar pits and quicksand even though quicksand looks like water and the tar pits like an open hole. The vines are your only way to clear these if they’re present, but there are variations where the pits will appear and disappear so you can run across while they’re gone if you’re fast enough. However, sometimes you enter a new screen and it might not look like there’s any danger, it easy to think you’ve been given a break only to see the pit spread open to swallow you. If a vine is there beforehand though, you can expect those disappearing pits to be a danger, but their existence also leads to one of the more interesting things about Pitfall!.

You’re always pressing forward in Pitfall! and able to do so rather speedily, but when you pop onto a new screen, there’s that moment where you need to take in what dangers are ahead. Seeing a gator pond makes the player on edge as they know they’ll need to be more careful than usual, but finding a screen devoted solely to the ladders down to the underground is a nice and simple break from the action. Walking onto a screen with an expanding pit leads to a quick weigh up of if you should rush forward or perhaps wait until it has opened and closed once to assure your safety, and naturally spotting one of the rare treasures gives you a nice little moment of success after careful but quick and constant traversal.

Score is the main goal of Pitfall, the treasures all adding to your point counter, but maintaining those points is a factor as well. Some screens will have rolling logs come towards you constantly, and luckily you don’t need to perfectly avoid these. Hitting one will drain you of some points the longer you’re touching it, but besides a few moments where they’re immediately next to you when you enter a new screen this is either manageable or not too big a penalty unless you were already going for the tough challenge of a perfect run. Similarly, dropping down one of the holes into the underground will take away some points, but it’s certainly a preferable outcome over an instant death.

THE VERDICT: With the tunnel systems adding a layer of exploration to the jungle journey and hazards that don’t stop being threatening even once you understand Harry’s movement, Pitfall! remains a game that can be fun for a quick session but one with enough depth if you go for the full set of treasures. Crossing the length of a screen only takes a few seconds and seeing how the hazards or enemies are placed on the next one keeps progress snappy while requiring a bit of thought so you can overcome the danger ahead. It’s an adventure that’s easy to return to, features a good metric for success that you can keep pushing to get better at, and includes a small batch of variables so grabbing all 32 treasures in 20 minutes feels achievable while still being a challenge.

And so, I give Pitfall! for the Atari 2600…

A GOOD rating. Pitfall!’s time limit does a lot for making its action as compelling as it is. You need to be careful since your extra lives are limited, but you need to keep moving so you don’t end up coming short when you’re close to a treasure. You can try and risk clearing those gators in three quick hops, but if you don’t have the rhythm right you could die and it’s easy to psyche yourself out and lose time for it. The little considerations tied to trying to fit the full adventure into twenty minutes makes Pitfall! more enjoyable than the sum of its hazards and screen layouts. Learning the tunnel system becomes key if you’re aiming for a full run but even just traversing the top area the whole time remains exciting because you’re not just trying to clear a danger, you’re trying to make sure you do so in as little time as necessary. You could almost compare it to a 100-meter hurdles competition in that each screen is a risky clear but whether it’s an early screen or late screen you mess up on you’ll still feel its impact on your overall performance. Being able to be hit by a log as soon as you’re on screen is a little unfortunate and perhaps the tunnels should have had more than scorpions to worry about to make that navigation more compelling when you head below, but Pitfall! gives you a good amount of room to make its treasure hunting challenge achievable. Getting more skilled at addressing what you see on screen and eventually figuring out which tunnels to take leads to a satisfying sense of accomplishment as you manage to gain more and more treasures on each subsequent run.

Despite always making an exception for Pitfall! when I thought old games might be too basic to enjoy, I was afraid that finally sitting down with it I would find it was in fact simplistic or lacking any sort of special spark. I know now that many of its contemporaries and predecessors can be very good of course, but even after always cutting it some slack due to its reputation I was surprised that it proved as enjoyable as it is. It has a good way of impressing the danger of your journey on you without making it so hard you’ll be put off. Jumping, running, and swinging are all easy enough to do but you have to do it just so and know your path forward to grab all the treasures, but even a less ambitious run where you see how many you can grab without dying is still exciting because the progress marked by grabbing them and finding them is neither too easy nor too hard. If anything, Pitfall! shows that something can both be simple in its presentation and components but still enjoyable if those pieces come together in the right way.