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.

is a video game set in a jungle where the player controls Pitfall Harry, a fortune hunter and explorer.

[1] Pitfall Harry moves left and right and can jump over and onto objects, swing from vines, and climb up and down ladders to seek treasure and avoid danger.

The player starts with three lives and loses one if they sink into quicksand, swamps or tar pits, running into fire, or are hit by a scorpion, cobra rattler, or crocodile.

[7] Crane was the senior designer at Activision and created Dragster, Fishing Derby, Laser Blast, Freeway and Grand Prix for the company prior to the release of Pitfall!

[1] Crane stated his game design philosophy involved making the Atari 2600 do new and unexpected things.

Crane said he "used this technique to lead me in a new direction of game design, and some of the tricks were to me as much as an accomplishment as solving the Rubik's Cube the first time".

[3] This led to developing a moving man (which became the basis of Pitfall Harry) and, later, the scorpions and snake obstacles.

[9] For three years, Crane experimented using the running-man character in different scenarios, such as a cops and robbers game, but could not find a proper situation for it.

[9] Crane stated having the running man animation led to putting him on a path, which led to placing the path in a jungle and giving the man a reason to run in order to hunt treasures and avoid enemies.

[12] This led to the ability of Pitfall Harry being able to cross ponds infested with crocodiles if their jaws were closed.

"[10] Crane tried to make the sprite artwork for obstacles and the environment recognizable to players, despite the limitations of the Atari 2600.

"[11] Much of Crane's time was spent optimizing and compressing the code so that it would fit into a four-kilobyte ROM cartridge.

[16] Unlike Haunted House (1982) or Raiders of the Lost Ark (1982), where the environments were hard-coded into the game, Pitfall!

[17] The 8 bits in the counter were used to determine certain details such as the background, trees, ground and object patterns, allowing 255 screens to occupy fewer than 50 bytes of ROM.

In Pitfall!, Crane's team changed the initial number of lives in the game from one to three during the final week of development.

would be released along with other Activision titles such as River Raid, Megamania, and Beamrider for the Atari 5200, ColecoVision, Commodore 64, and MSX.

[37][44] The reviewer for Blip stated that the game was similar to Donkey Kong (1981), but that "this is one case where inspiration didn't lead to imitation.

[38] Scott Alan Marriott of the online game database AllGame wrote that the variety of threats you encounter on each screen made Pitfall!

was described by authors Montfort and Bogost in Racing the Beam as an important early platformer, a game genre made famous by Super Mario Bros.

According to them, the world was too large to be contemplated all at once, and a few core gameplay mechanics allowed a variety of more complex actions and possibilities.

[12] The character was featured on licensed merchandise and appeared on the cartoon show Saturday Supercade, which aired from 1983 to 1985 on CBS.

[26] Activision's UK-based studio The Blast Furnace released a follow-up titled Pitfall!

"[69] In the same year, he started a crowdfunding campaign Kickstarter to fund a spiritual successor to the Pitfall!