Pitfall!

Pitfall! is a game by David Crane for the Atari 2600 and released in 1982. The player controls Pitfall Harry and is tasked with collecting all the treasures in a jungle within 20 minutes avoiding obstacles and hazards. It inspired numerous sequels and ports across a variety of gaming consoles and helped define the side-scrolling plat-former genre.

Pitfall is fun for the first moments of playing. Graphically it is very simple, but you know what everything is, from your player character and the different creatures, to the forest background and underground pits you know what everything is. Game-play is rather simple, you move right or left and jump over obstacles in your way. The challenge of the game comes from the preciseness of the players jump, the most difficult jumps for me was the alligator ponds, but once you get past them you feel a sense of accomplishment. However as stated earlier in the paragraph I found it only fun for the first few minutes.

My main issue with Pitfall is that it is repetitive with what you can do. All you do is move forward and jump, which wouldn’t be a bad thing if each screen you move through was unique. This isn’t the case however, having to jump over the same pond with alligators in it got extremely tiring. Not only that once you master the timing of your jumps there is any more challenge left in the game-play so there isn’t any more enjoyment left to gain. Furthermore, after scrolling for a few sections only getting one treasure I began to wonder what else to do as I continued scrolling past similar looking screens. I found myself losing interest and had to stop playing for a while to continue.

When Pitfall first came out I’m sure it was very revolutionary for the time, but for someone like me who has played more interesting side-scrollers like Super Mario Brothers it was hard to stay invested.