Retrospective: Pitfall!

When my daughter was around eight or nine years old, she really enjoyed playing one of those rhythm games that made use of motion controllers. The game was about choreographed cheerleading routines and the player was scored based on how closely she mimicked the moves seen on screen. The more closely the player did so, the more experience points she earned for her cheerleader character, which, in turn, unlocked more difficult routines and other options.

While my daughter mostly cared about the cool new outfits she could earn with sufficient experience points, what held my attention was its use of experience points. Here was a video game about cheerleading, produced in Japan in the early 21st century, and an integral part of its gameplay was a game mechanic introduced to the world through Dungeons & Dragons. I found that incredibly fascinating, if only because it was a reminder of just how influential D&D (and, by extension, tabletop RPGs) have been over the course of the last half-century. 

The other side of the coin is a bit more contentious, namely, the extent to which video and computer games have influenced roleplaying games. With very few exceptions, I can't recall too many examples of tabletop designers who've outright said that their designs had taken inspiration from video games. My general feeling is that it's easier to turn a tabletop idea into a digital one than vice versa, hence why we've not seen many explicit examples of the reverse. Even so, video and computer games are very popular and have been for decades now. My guess is that much of the influence from the digital realm is subconscious, since I'd wager nearly everyone involved in tabletop RPG design has enjoyed playing video games.

Count me among them. I was an enthusiastic early adopter of video games, getting an Atari Video Game System in 1980, with which I played fun games like Adventure and Raiders of the Lost Ark, among many, many more. While there would soon be other, arguably better video game systems on the market, I was quite satisfied with my Atari, in large part because of the excellent games produced by companies like Activision. As I recall, the company was founded by disgruntled former Atari programmers who felt ill-used and underappreciated by their former employer. Their "revenge" was to produce innovative, original game cartridges that outsold Atari's own.

I owned and enjoyed numerous Activision cartridges, but, hands down, my favorite was Pitfall! released in 1982. Pitfall! is an early example of what today we'd call a platformer, in that the player controls a character who must navigate various obstacles and hazards found on various levels (or platforms) on the screen. Nintendo's Donkey Kong is a good example of a well-known platformer. What made Pitfall! so innovative was that, while it did feature multiple levels on each screen, it also featured multiple screens. The player could maneuver his character, called Pitfall Harry, horizontally across the screen and a new screen, with different obstacles and platforms would reveal itself. This might not seem like much, but in 1982, it was revolutionary.

Pitfall! was noteworthy in several other ways. The game's premise was that Harry, a treasure hunter on the model of Indiana Jones, is seeking gold and silver bars, bags of money, and diamond rings that are hidden throughout a dangerous jungle. He has only 20 minutes to collect as many of these valuables as he can, all the while avoiding scorpions, crocodiles, snakes, quicksand, and other hazards. Pitfall! is thus a race against time, as well as a test of skill and ingenuity. Many of the aforementioned treasures can only be reached by the imaginative use of the environment, like swinging on vines, climbing ladders, and moving back and forth between screens to reach areas that might otherwise be unreachable.

Like most video games of its era, Pitfall! was difficult. The player had only three lives and there were numerous ways for the unwary – or just clumsy – to lose them. Rather than being simply frustrating, though, that was a big part of the game's appeal to me. I loved being challenged, even if it meant frequently dying by falling into a hole or being snapped by a crocodile due to a poorly timed swing on a vine. I almost always knew exactly what I'd done wrong and reckoned that I could do better next time (or the time after that or ...). 

This kind of gameplay, this emphasis on challenging the player, is something I directly ported into my D&D games at the time – as well as specific challenges I lifted directly from Pitfall!, like swinging vines and quicksand, to name just a couple. Looking back on it now, I can't help but feel that many early video and computer games included these challenging obstacles and hazardous as an homage to what their designers encountered in playing tabletop RPGs. In the case of Pitfall! I certainly can't prove it, but I'd nevertheless be amazed if its creators hadn't played D&D or some other dungeon crawling game refereed by a Killer DM. 

I'm old and slow now. I no longer have the reflexes or hand-eye coordination necessary to play games like Pitfall! quite as successfully as I did in my youth. That's one (of many) ways that tabletop roleplaying games remain superior to their digital descendants: even geezers like me still have a chance, through our characters, to dodge rolling logs or leap over a giant scorpion, in a way we'd never be able to accomplish if we had only our real world physical skills and abilities to rely upon. The joy of tabletop RPGs is that, even in your mid-50s, you can still grab a vine and swing across a crocodile-infested pool and steal away with an ancient treasure with as much ease as you did when you were a kid. Not a bad form of entertainment, eh?