Pitfall!

Pitfall! is a platform 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 treasures 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! was developed by David Crane for Activision. Crane had worked at Atari, Inc. in the late 1970s, developing games for the Atari Video Computer System (the system became known as the Atari 2600 after the release of the Atari 5200 in 1982).

After discovering the high profits Atari had made from games he developed, including Outlaw, Canyon Bomber and Slot Machine, he asked the president of Atari, Ray Kassar, for recognition on these titles and better pay. When he was turned down, Crane and other Atari programmers left the company to form Activision in 1979. 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!

In contemporary reviews, critics praised the gameplay and graphics in publications like Arcade Express and Electronic Fun with Computers & Games, with the former stating that it "may well be the best adventure game yet produced for the VCS". The reviewer for Blip 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."

In JoyStik: How to Win at Video Games, the game was named as one of the ten best games of 1982. The Atari 2600 version of Pitfall! was awarded "Best Adventure Video Game" at the 4th annual Arkie Awards in 1983.

Pitfall! was described by authors Montfort and Bogost in Racing the Beam as an important early platformer, a game genre made famous by Super Mario Bros. (1985). They wrote that Pitfall!

was a much longer game than previous Atari VCS games. These other games were often ports of arcade games which were designed to be a short experience to keep the player pay to play, but even native games could be rather short—the easiest difficulty of Adventure can be completed in just two minutes. The authors said that Pitfall! built upon the graphic adventure game genre of Adventure to create an experience similar to later open-world games.