Pitfall! | Code Like It's 198x

“In Pitfall you get to play electronic Tarzan and Mario the Carpenter all at once,” wrote Video Games in December 1982. Pitfall Harry runs, climbs ladders, jumps pits, swings across swamps on a vine with a Tarzan yell, and hops across the heads of crocodiles, all in a jungle of 255 screens. David Crane fitted the whole thing into a 4K cartridge for the Atari 2600. By Activision’s account it was the best-selling video game of 1982.

Fast facts

Designer: David Crane, for Activision.
Platform: Atari 2600, 1982; later Intellivision, ColecoVision and the Commodore 64, among others.
The task: find 32 treasures across 255 screens in 20 minutes, with three lives.
Cartridge: 4K of ROM.
Awards: Best Adventure Videogame in Electronic Games’ Arcade Awards, 1983.
Sequel: Pitfall II: Lost Caverns (1984).

Twenty minutes in the jungle

Computer & Video Games’ guide sent Harry after “the 32 lost treasures of Enarc”, and pointed out the joke: Enarc is Crane spelt backwards. He has 20 minutes and three lives. He starts with 2,000 points and gains more only by picking up treasure: a bag of money is worth 2,000 points and a diamond ring 5,000. Everything else costs him. A rolling log knocks points off, and falling into a pit costs 100. Losing a life, oddly, costs nothing, and the game carries on even when the score reaches zero.

The hazards change from screen to screen: rolling logs, campfires, cobras, tar pits and quicksand that open and close, swamps crossed by vine, and pools of crocodiles that can only be crossed by jumping on their heads while their jaws are shut. Videogaming Illustrated timed the jaws at 2.1 seconds open and 2.1 seconds shut. Below the jungle runs a tunnel, guarded by scorpions and sometimes blocked by brick walls. It is dangerous, but each screen underground moves Harry three screens along the surface, so a player chasing the clock learns where the ladders are.

Electronic Fun’s reviewer, in December 1982, picked out the size of the world: “Instead of just 19 or 20 ‘rooms’ to explore, Pitfall! has 255 jungle scenes.” Knowing the route did not finish the game either, because the player could still try to beat a previous score: “you must also attempt to score a maximum number of points.”

How it fitted in 4K

Crane had built a realistic running figure in 1979 and carried him around for three years before he found the game for him. In 1982 he drew a stick figure on a sheet of paper, put him on a path, put the path in a jungle and gave him treasure to run towards. The crocodiles came from a Heckle and Jeckle cartoon in which two magpies ran across alligators’ heads.

The jungle could not be stored screen by screen. “There isn’t enough memory to hold both Harry’s graphic frames and the definitions for 254 screens,” Crane told Edge in 2003 (period guides count 255). “I solved this problem on Pitfall! by creating an algorithm that defined every screen mathematically. The actual definition of the entire world took less than 50 bytes of ROM.” The jump over the crocodiles needed a smaller fix. At first the player had to push the joystick and press the button at exactly the same moment, which proved “almost impossible to play”; Crane let the push come just after the button, and the move became “an easily learned skill”.

Computer & Video Games put the work at 500 to 700 programming hours over six or seven months; Edge’s account had it at about 1,000 hours. The full story is in David Crane.

Sales, awards and clubs

In May 1983 Electronic Fun reported Activision’s claim that Pitfall! and Crane’s Laser Blast had each sold a million copies, and that Pitfall! was the best-selling game of 1982: “if Pitfall! and Laser Blast were rock albums they’d have gone platinum by now.” Later figures grew in the retelling. Commodore User wrote in 1985 that it was “reputed to have sold more than five million copies”, and Edge reported in 2003 that it spent 64 weeks at the top of the Billboard chart.

Electronic Games gave it Best Adventure Videogame in its 1983 Arcade Awards, calling it “as richly complex a videogame as you’ll find anywhere”, and its readers voted it straight to the top of the magazine’s popularity poll in its first month. In Britain, TV Gamer’s readers voted it their game of the year in 1984.

Activision kept players coming back with its clubs. A score of 20,000 points qualified for Pitfall Harry’s Explorers Club, which sent a jacket patch and a letter of recognition, and Activision ran clubs for 25 of its other games as well.

Ports, a court case and a sequel

Activision converted the game to Mattel’s Intellivision in late 1982, and to other machines, including the ColecoVision, whose version Electronic Games found “remarkably similar” to the original. In Britain, Activision’s first Commodore 64 releases in 1984 included Pitfall! and Pitfall II.

The game was copied, too. In 1984 Activision took Microdeal to court over Cuthbert in the Jungle, a game for the Dragon 32. TV Gamer reported that Activision won, and listed the points of similarity it had put to the court: an underground chamber reached by ladders and holes, fatal scorpions, brick walls, three crocodiles to cross by jumping on their heads when the jaws were shut, logs rolling from right to left, and gold bars, money bags and diamonds to collect.

Pitfall II: Lost Caverns (1984) took Harry into caverns full of condors, bats, eels and albino scorpions, with two new characters, Rhonda and Quickclaw. Red crosses served as checkpoints: touch a bat and Harry was carried back to the last cross he had touched, losing points on the way. Activision’s British list of 1984 conversions for the ZX Spectrum included Pitfall II, but not the original.

Sources

Video Games vol. 1 no. 3, December 1982, pp. 56–58, software reviews by Perry Greenberg: “electronic Tarzan and Mario the Carpenter”.
Video Games Player vol. 1 no. 1, September 1982: release calendar; the Intellivision version due in November.
Videogaming Illustrated, October 1982: Activision “will ship next month”.
Videogaming Illustrated, December 1982, pp. 30–31, “Conquering: Pitfall”: scoring, treasure values, the crocodiles’ timing, the tunnels, Harry’s yell.
Electronic Fun with Computers & Games vol. 1 no. 2, December 1982, p. 62, review: 255 scenes, 20 minutes, 2,000 points to start.
Electronic Games vol. 1 no. 11, January 1983: Arcade Awards, Best Adventure Videogame; the readers’ popularity poll.
Electronic Fun with Computers & Games vol. 1 no. 7, May 1983: Activision’s sales claims.
Electronic Fun with Computers & Games vol. 1 no. 11, September 1983: Pitfall Harry’s Explorers Club.
Computer & Video Games issue 28, February 1984, p. 40: interview with David Crane (500–700 hours); “Professor Video goes on Pitfall safari” (32 treasures of Enarc, 255 screens, 20 minutes, three lives, the tunnels).
TV Gamer, June 1984: readers’ game of the year; Pitfall II advertisement.
TV Gamer, July 1984: review of Pitfall II (the red crosses).
TV Gamer, September 1984: the Microdeal case; Activision’s Commodore 64 and Spectrum releases.
Electronic Games vol. 2 no. 14, September 1984: the ColecoVision version.
Commodore User, April 1985, p. 8, profile of David Crane: “five million copies”.
“The making of… Pitfall”, Edge issue 129, November 2003, pp. 114–115: the running man, the crocodiles, the algorithm, 4K of ROM, 1,000 hours, 64 weeks on the Billboard chart.