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. 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. The jungle Pitfall Harry needs to traverse manages to have a large sense of scale even on the humble hardware of the Atari 2600. 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.
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. 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.
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. 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. 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. 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!. 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. 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. I wasn’t always the guy who wanted to play every video game ever released.
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