Pitfall! by David Crane was released in 1982 for the Atari 2600 but it was not created in a vacuum, drawing as it did from a blood-soaked cultural heritage stretching far back into the misty past.  In a direct sense, it has been a project of Crane’s since 1979.  Crane famously described the design process as “I sat down with a blank sheet of paper and drew a stick figure in the center.  I said, "Okay, I have a little running man and let's put him on a path.

Where is the path? Let's put it in a jungle.  Why is he running?"  And Pitfall! was born.  This entire process took about ten minutes.  About 1,000 hours of programming later, the game was complete.”  The thematic overtones of the game seemed to have come to Crane almost automatically, by his own admission, and the way that the game came together without any serious forethought being put into that creation process it shows how thoroughly these neo-colonial ideas of the mighty explorer, bravely exploring an unseen jungle are embedded into our culture.

Not only is Pitfall! itself an uncritical celebration of the Western world’s colonial legacy, but the game itself has left the platforming genre and gaming as a whole in the habit of empowering the colonizer and demonizing the colonized.  Sometimes metaphorically, and oftentimes literally.  The Pitfall games on the Atari 2600 are not the only games to utilize this colonial legacy, but they are among the first and the most influential in perpetuating that legacy in many games which came after.

Colonialism itself is a concept as old as recorded human history.  There has always been a propensity in our culture for more aggressive cultures to seize the territory and resources of people groups who are not able to defend themselves.  Empires, then sovereigns, and our modern nation-states have all engaged in colonial exploitation at one point or another.  China expanded and solidified its hegemony over enormous swathes of land and peoples for over 2,000 years.  The Roman Empire expanded and conquered and then managed to hold onto most of Europe for thousands of years.  But these were regional, hegemonic powers, the types which are easily to simulate in games like Civilization or Total War because they’re one geographically homogenous piece of arbitrary territory which one group is able to dictate political control.  This is not the type of colonialism in which the events of Pitfall! are taking place.

After the Industrial Revolution, the bourgeois capitalist class of the industrialized nation-states required more raw materials than were available within their borders in order to power the new industrial engines of their economies.  They now had the technology to bring supplies against the course of rivers and the medicine to keep their soldiers and administrators alive to seize territory and resources from other continents.  Belgium was the first of these nations to industrialize, and they along with the other Great Powers of Europe met in Berlin to carve up the African continent between them.  While Belgium is seen as a mild state on the same spectrum as Canada today, they were brutal colonizers.

In the Congo, the regime of Belgian monarch King Leopold II’s Congo Free State is estimated to have caused half of the Congo basin’s population to die.  Many more were mutilated by having their hands and feet chopped off if they failed to bring the colonizers the resources they required.  This was a major international scandal at the time, but media sources then and now were less likely to publicize stories about the horrors of colonialism, such as Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, as they were to create endless stories and later films about properties such as Tarzan, showing a white man becoming one with the wild and unexplored jungle.

If the average person were to know anything about famed explorer Henry Morton Stanley, it is far more likely to be the story of Dr. Livingston with the endlessly quoted line “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?” than anything about his service to Leopold in mapping out the boundaries for the exploitative Congo Free State.

So it was this cultural miasma, filtered through generations of motion pictures glorifying the pith-helmet clad explorers slashing their way through unexplored jungle with their machetes in hand, acquiring amazing treasure and maybe saving a damsel in distress on the way out too.  David Crane did not even need to think about the implications of what he was imagining, there was enough colonial imagery from media he’d probably been absorbing for his entire life to fill in the blanks automatically.  The protagonist of Crane’s Pitfall! is a little white man named Pitfall Harry.

The instruction manual describes the setting as such: “Picture This! You are deep in the recesses of a forbidden jungle -- an unforgiving place which few explorers ever survive.”  The treasures you can take her aren’t natural resources, but gold and jewels.  Not just any wealth, but processed wealth.  Diamond rings, gold and silver bars, and literal bags of cash money are available for Harry to collect and gain between 2000 and 5000 points per looting.

Throughout the game, most of the obstacles you face are the hostile wildlife in the jungle.  Crocodiles, scorpions, poisonous Cobras, and other creatures block Harry’s progress at every turn.  Pitfall Harry is the only living human you see directly at any point in the game, or in the instruction manual.  However, there are clear signs that you are not the first person to be in this region.  In terms of obstacles, there are plenty of cut logs which are rolling in from just off-screen which must have been pushed by somebody.  Every screen in the game has some sort of underground passage, which would have taken extensive human labor and architectural knowledge to accomplish.

Not to mention the ladders and brick walls which adorn these underground pathways.  Whatever culture constructed the infrastructure Pitfall Harry is spelunking through, they were certainly a developed and intelligent culture in terms of their engineering prowess.  That’s not to mention the fact that the wealth you find suggests that whoever owned it originally was fully capable of smelting and shaping ingots of precious metal.  Gold and silver bars, as mentioned before, are some of the most common treasures the player can guide Pitfall Harry to loot.

The diamond rings could have come straight out of a De Beers family diamond catalog.  Not to mention the literal bags of cash, which suggests that in terms of its overall development the peoples who formerly inhabited this area were not only developed enough as a culture to have advanced engineering and smelting, but economic theory which had progressed to the point where paper currency was used alongside precious specie.

The implication here is clear: Pitfall Harry, whether he is being sponsored by a government or corporation back in his homeland, is a colonizer coming to a land which has been devastated by the usual tools of the colonizer - superior forces of arms, deadly disease, and enough crocodile-hide whips to make sure the entire population is so terrified that they will work themselves to death before they rise up and challenge their oppressors.

There are a few explanations for why there would be no human characters other than Harry.  It would be implausible to state that this area is uninhabited, given that nearly every screen in the game has some evidence showing that Harry’s not the first one to come around these parts.  Perhaps the people had advanced knowledge of his coming, and had hidden themselves to avoid being enslaved or killed.

It is equally possible that they have already been wiped out by a deadly pandemic which devastated their population before the colonizers could even reach them.  It could even be that the native inhabitants have been massacred already, and Harry is now being sent in to loot every piece of wealth which was missed by the first wave of death and desecration.

In any case, it is not possible for the player to know.  Their only task is to collect the treasure so that they may acquire victory.  Pitfall! is very different from the arcade-based experiences offered by contemporary games such as Pole Position II or Ms. Pac-Man where the only real objective was to complete a repetitive task for a high score.  Pitfall! is widely credited as having invented the side-scrolling genre of games, along with being one of the first to use a “jungle” environment.

Both the gameplay and the imagery of Pitfall! are still influencing the games which have been built atop its legacy.  It’s interesting to note the game space of Pitfall! is universally referred to as a jungle environment even though there are plenty of man-made structures, not to mention the man-made wealth which is being seized by Pitfall Harry.  This is a perfect example of how the media trivializes colonial imagery and downplays its significance.  The fact that we have established the grim crimes against humanity which exported these tropes into our cultural consciousness and yet it still seems silly to speak about the game where the pixel man jumps over the crocodiles shows the level of indoctrination present in our “baseline” culture.

Games which draw from this legacy don’t tend to examine themselves and their thematic schematics critically, especially given how the descendants of the colonizers are more often target audiences for these games than the colonized.

The actions the player is permitted to take can encourage a colonial mindset and make them engage in exploitative behavior without questioning what it is they’re actually doing.  You can see this even in the games which could be considered the contemporaries of Pitfall! in terms of when they were released, or by using the conventions pioneered by Crane.  Games which have themes of singular explorers from a more advanced society coming to explore, exploit, or explode foreign lands include Metroid, The Adventures of Bayou Billy, Congo Bongo, and Fantasy World Dizzy all share these elements to some degree.

The inspiration was not always subtle, as in the case of Montezuma’s Revenge starring “Panama Joe” which depicts a grave-robber trying to steal as many valuables as possible from the ancient tomb of an imperial monarch.  Just like in Pitfall!, you only win once you’ve taken all of the treasure, you don’t even have to get to a goal, taking all of the treasure in of itself is the only objective which must be achieved.  Adventure Island plays like the logical next step to Pitfall! by taking place in a similar jungle environment in which a loincloth-clad white man skateboards through Africa consuming all of the food and killing wildlife indiscriminately.  Many of these titles are remembered fondly as all-time classics for their respective platforms, era, and genre.

There are many more contemporary games that continue to draw from the same pitfall-laden legacy of David Crane’s creation.  Thousands of kids grew up playing Oregon Trail on their Apple IIe’s in school computer labs, which is an unquestioning and uncritical endorsement of all that the white man benefited from via manifest destiny.  The people who lived on that land died from a lot worse than dysentery.

The Pikmin franchise revolves around an alien military figure who militarizes a group of the native population in order so that he may divide and conquer the rest of the population in order to extract resources for his exclusive benefit.  Procedurally generated exploration games like No Man’s Sky have core gameplay loops which revolve around visiting an endless number of planetoids inhabited by creatures with their own unique feelings, characteristics and personalities, and then take everything you can away from them up to and including their lives.

There are also arcade games like Donkey Kong which while they are less obviously about exploitation, put their characters into situations which could only have occurred in a colonial society in which wealth and exotic life have been stolen from their homeland and brought back at prizes shown off in the modern-day equivalent of the Roman triumph.

The titular Donkey Kong is an animal brought back from a colonial holding to show off to the people, escaping and kidnapping a white woman who has to be rescued by one of the burly blue-collar colonizers.  It is directly inspired by King Kong, so much so that Universal pictures decided to sue them but lost due to the fact that Universal had previously released the picture into the public domain.  There are many adventure pictures in the public domain, the aforementioned swashbuckling machete-wielding conquerors.

Not every game is a colonial experience that cannot be enjoyed without the controller leaving some blood on the player’s hands.  Simulation games such as Theme Park, Theme Hospital, SimCity, and Nintendogs take great logical leaps to classify as being directly inspired by colonial themes or having problematic aspects to their gameplay.

There are even some titles such as Victoria II in which you could argue that, because the game allows you the freedom to play as the colonized nations and turn the tables on the oppressors, the equality of perspectives provided is an acknowledgement of the plight of colonized people and at the very least, by allowing you to play as them it gives them a voice which has otherwise been snuffed out of many historical records and the media of contemporary culture.

But it is not just games which feed the unending hunger for colonial media in Western culture.  A feature film inspired by these same cultural influences is Steven Spielberg’s Raiders of the Lost Ark. The film raised the profile of the lone adventurer going to exotic lands to the extent that it boosted Pitfall!’s popularity and the visibility of media like it within the wider mass cultural consciousness.  Despite the game crash of 1983, Pitfall Harry was still well-known to the point where he was given a starring role in seven episodes of the animated Saturday Supercade children’s show.  Pitfall Harry’s is depicted as running around with a whip like he’d just got back from King Leopold’s Congo.

The whip has long been a symbol of colonial power, fictional heroes like Indiana Jones use it to swing across gaps and keep enemies at bay.  But historically, those who wielded whips used them to demonstrate their power.  The slave owning plantation-owner class of the American South were infamous for beating their slaves to death or leaving them carrying thick scars for the rest of their lives.  Future tyrant Adolf Hitler had a habit of carrying a whip around in his younger years in order to beat up anybody weaker than he was to impress his strength upon observers.

Media glorifying colonial imagery are some of the most consistently profitable pieces of popular art both in the time of Pitfall! to our present day.  The release of Pitfall! was one of the first big third-party hits for the Atari 2600.  The television advertisements for Pitfall! feature a 13 year old Jack Black, making his acting debut on the silver screen.

In 2017, Jack Black starred in Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle which was followed by Jumanji: The Next Level in 2019.  Both titles mix the pith-helmet clad explorers of old with modern video game tropes we would have seen in titles like Pitfall!, Adventure Island, Jungle Hunt, and more modern titles like the latest Animal Crossing game.  Another sequel is more likely than not coming soon, given that these pictures have made hundreds of millions of dollars.

Underneath all of the hype, pomp, and circumstance, at the core of each of these games is the same alienating, exploitative loop: Parallel experiences depicting the barren emptiness of dead societies where disease has wiped out aboriginal populations, leaving nothing but wreckage and ruin to explore and loot.  Once the blood has dried, the treasure chests emptied and the resource tiles tapped out, all that is left is the hollowed-out void.