Pitfall

Pitfall is a video game in the action genre originally released in 1984. It is currently playable on DOS.

Pitfall is a lovely old ASCII game. It is a horizontal falling game (also known as 'Wrist Killer') in which you use the arrow keys to maneuver your constantly falling ship through a corridor of walls and enemies (Burning Faces). Although you can't move upwards, you can use the up key to hover and move laterally, which means you can bypass more dangerous areas, but each time you hover, your ship naturally moves further away from the screen, so you have to continually accelerate downwards whenever you can in order to hover again as necessary once you're further down the shaft.

Your ship has a certain amount of hits (hit points) that decrease by 1 each time you hit a wall, and hitting a Fiery Face means instant death. Over time, the enemies become more numerous and the walls get closer and closer and harder to get around, and even though you gain more hits every 30 seconds or so, you will eventually crash into one too many walls and explode.

I've often referred to this game as the original Coffee Break, which is what it is; a frustrating, wrist-killing game whenever you have a few minutes. The game generally runs MUCH faster on today's computers, but if you have DosBOX you can slow down the cycles until the game is fully playable. On my 850mhz Athlon I find that 150-175 cycles is just about perfect.

It is possible that we have multiple downloads available when different versions exist.