Pitfall
638K plays 1984 #Action
Pitfall! is a 1982 platform video game developed by David Crane and published by Activision for the Atari 2600. The player controls Pitfall Harry, who has a time limit of 20 minutes to seek treasure in a jungle. The game world is populated by enemies and hazards that variously cause the player to lose lives or points. Pitfall! was ported to the Atari 5200, Atari 8-bit computers, ColecoVision, Commodore 64, and MSX.
Crane had made several games for both Atari, Inc. and Activision before working on Pitfall! in 1982. He started with creating a realistic-style walking animation for a person on the Atari 2600 hardware, then fashioned a game around it. He used a jungle setting with items to collect and enemies to avoid, and the result became Pitfall!
Pitfall! received positive reviews at the time of its release praising both its gameplay and graphics. It was influential in the platform game genre, and various publications have considered it as being amongst the greatest video games of all time. It is also one of the best-selling Atari 2600 video games, as well as the best-selling Atari 2600 game that’s not an arcade port. It has been included in various Activision compilation games and was included as a secret extra in later Activision-published titles. A more advanced sequel, Pitfall II: Lost Caverns, was released in 1984.
From Wikipedia's article Pitfall!, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0
Controls
This is a PC game: it uses the keyboard the way it did under MS-DOS, and the mouse where the game supports it. Click the game screen first so it gets your key presses.
Many DOS games start with a menu or ask a question first — read the screen and answer with the keyboard. Arrow keys, Enter, Space, Ctrl and Alt are the usual game keys.
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Controls
This is a PC game: it uses the keyboard the way it did under MS-DOS, and the mouse where the game supports it. Click the game screen first so it gets your key presses.
Many DOS games start with a menu or ask a question first — read the screen and answer with the keyboard. Arrow keys, Enter, Space, Ctrl and Alt are the usual game keys.
3.5 Good job
Players 77 · 1,455 votes
No critic scores found for this game: this is the players' rating.
Review scorecard
- Graphics 3.5 out of 5 Overall fallback
- Sound 3.5 out of 5 Overall fallback
- Control 3.5 out of 5 Overall fallback
- Fun Factor 3.5 out of 5 Overall fallback
Overall fallback: Players 77 · 1,455 votes. The same 77/100 overall rating fills missing categories using the face scale; these are not separate category scores. Player rating; no critic scores available.
What the reviews talk about
Key wordsfungorgeousexciting
What the critics said
Computer and Video Games (1989) stated that Pitfall! was a "bright and cheery game" that offered plenty of long-term gameplay, continuing that the "game style might look a bit crumbly, but the action is a heap of fun".
— Computer and Video Games
Electronic Games, in their "1983 Software Encyclopedia" issue, noted that the game required "more arcade-type skills than intuition or logic".
— Electronic Games· about another version
From the Reception section of Wikipedia's Pitfall! article, under CC BY-SA 4.0. The words are the critics'; their full reviews are on the publishers' pages.
Scores
- AllGame 5/5; 4.5/5 (other versions)
From the review table of Wikipedia's article. The face takes, first that applies: the Metascore for this platform, GameRankings' average, our average of the critics (one number per publication, a panel averaged), one review alone, the players' rating. Critics and players are never mixed.
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