Lets talk about the game for Atari known as PITFALL. I will be detailing my experience with the game as well as telling a you a little bit about the game’s history.
Atari PITFALL is a game that was made by David Crane and released in 1982. He has described his process as; he sat down and drew a stick man running on a path, then he asked himself “where is the stickman running?” in a jungle, and why is he running? Then David drew some treasure and enemies. The thing I find funny about this is the fact that they reason David wanted to make a game because they had a “realistic man” running made, and nothing for him to do.
I appreciate the fact that pitfall was made because it is generally considered to have made the side scrolling platformer genre of game. Because without it, even games like Mario wouldn’t be the same without pitfall. Some of the games I enjoy myself in most are side scrolling games specifically Shantae the Half Genie Hero.
My experience with pitfall varied quite a bit. Sometimes when I’d sit down, I would play one session for about 15 minutes and making it quite far and gathering around 20 of the 32 treasures. But, yet in others I would play and only find one or two treasure and make it a few minutes in. The game hit boxes are a little weird, that or I am just bad and not used to the game yet. As the game progressed, I tried playing pitfall in black and white instead of color and seeing if it made much of a difference. Needless to say, it seemed a little harder then it was in color. I think this is because when it black and white all the colors are just shades of the same color, making them mesh together more then if they were in color.
In conclusion I believe that PITFALL is an ok game overall. While it differs from the last two games that we have played in the sense that there doesn’t seem to be an ending to the game, you just go and get a score. There’s no real reason that you can infer that you should do any of it where as with Colossal Cave Adventure you are lost in the woods and you can infer that you must find a way. And with Atari Adventure you see a castle and can infer that from the name of that game that you must explore. But with PITFALL there isn’t much to go off of. I still enjoyed my time with the game and found it fun to play. Overall, it was a good time.
