How to play Pitfall! online
- Run: left and right arrow keys
- Ladders: up to climb, down to go underground
- Jump: Z (the lower buttons). Press it while running towards a swinging vine to grab hold.
- Let go of a vine: down arrow
- Jump from crocodile to crocodile: X (the upper buttons)
- Pick up treasure: just run past it
- Start: Enter, at any time. Pause: P; press any digit key 0 to 8 to carry on.
- The keypad has no other function in this game. Full screen, Restart and save states are in the emulator’s toolbar; move the mouse over the screen to see it.
Gameplay
Pitfall Harry runs through a jungle of 255 screens, one screen at a time, with 20 minutes on the clock and three lives. There are 32 treasures to find, eight each of money bags, silver bars, gold bars and diamond rings, and you pick them up simply by running over them. Below the jungle floor is a tunnel system with ladders, which lets you skip several screens at a stretch but has scorpions of its own.
Hazards come in two kinds. Open holes and rolling logs only cost points: 100 for a fall, and a steady drain for every moment you stay in contact with a log. Scorpions, fires, cobras, crocodiles, swamps, quicksand and tar pits cost a life. Crocodile pits are crossed by hopping from head to head while their jaws are shut, or by swinging over on a vine. You start with 2,000 points, and the game ends when the time runs out or the third Harry is lost.
| Treasure | Points |
|---|---|
| Money bag | 2,000 |
| Silver bar | 3,000 |
| Gold bar | 4,000 |
| Diamond ring | 5,000 |
All 32 treasures together are worth 112,000 points, so a perfect run that loses nothing to logs and holes finishes on 114,000. Activision invited anyone who reached 20,000 points to send in a photograph of the screen and join the Explorers’ Club.
Tips
- Go left. This is David Crane’s own advice: the logs roll from right to left, and after a lost life Harry drops back in on the left side of the screen, so heading left means fewer logs to jump and fewer hazards to repeat.
- Draw a map. With 255 screens and only 20 minutes you cannot explore everything. Note where the treasures are and which underground passages save time.
- Crocodiles: wait for the jaws. Jump onto the first head when the mouth closes, wait through one open-and-close, then jump to the next.
The story behind Pitfall! on the 5200
David Crane was one of the Atari programmers who left in 1979 to found Activision. Pitfall! began as an experiment in animating a running man; the jungle around him was partly inspired by Raiders of the Lost Ark, and the three lives were added in the last week of development. The Atari 2600 cartridge came out in September 1982, sold a million copies that year, stayed at number one in Billboard’s video game chart for 64 weeks and won Best Adventure Video Game at the 1983 Arkie Awards.
Activision announced 5200 versions of Pitfall!, River Raid, Megamania and Beamrider in January 1984 and shipped Pitfall! (model FZ-004) in March, together with the Atari 8-bit computer version. Both were converted by Beck-Tech rather than by Crane himself. The 5200 game plays like the 2600 original with fuller jungle backdrops, and it uses both fire buttons, one for jumps and one for crocodile hopping. The controls got the most criticism: Brett Weiss later singled out the 5200 version for its poor controls, largely because of the console’s non-centring joystick.
