Pitfall! is a 1982 platform video game developed by David Crane and published by Activision for the Atari 2600. 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. Pitfall! was ported to the Atari 5200, Atari 8-bit computers, ColecoVision, Commodore 64, and MSX.

Crane had made several games for both Atari, Inc. and Activision before working on Pitfall! in 1982. He started with creating a realistic-style walking animation for a person on the Atari 2600 hardware, then fashioned a game around it. He used a jungle setting with items to collect and enemies to avoid, and the result became Pitfall!

Pitfall! received positive reviews at the time of its release praising both its gameplay and graphics. It was influential in the platform game genre, and various publications have considered it as being amongst the greatest video games of all time. It is also one of the best-selling Atari 2600 video games, as well as the best-selling Atari 2600 game that’s not an arcade port. It has been included in various Activision compilation games and was included as a secret extra in later Activision-published titles. A more advanced sequel, Pitfall II: Lost Caverns, was released in 1984.

Pitfall! is a platform game set in a jungle where the player controls Pitfall Harry, a fortune hunter and explorer. Pitfall! has been characterized as a platformer by Nick Montfort and Ian Bogost, the authors of Racing the Beam. Similar to Superman (1979) and Adventure (1980), the game does not feature side-scrolling and instead loads one screen at a time, with a new screen appearing when the player character, Pitfall Harry, moves to the edge of the screen. The goal is to get Harry as many points as possible within a twenty-minute time limit. The player starts the game with 2,000 points and can collect a total of 32 treasure hidden among 255 scenes to increase their total, ranging from a money bag worth 2,000 points to a diamond ring worth 5,000 points.

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 can lose points from hazards, such as falling down a hole or colliding with rolling logs. 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.

Pitfall! was developed by David Crane for Activision. Crane had worked at Atari, Inc. in the late 1970s, developing games for the Atari Video Computer System (the system became known as the Atari 2600 after the release of the Atari 5200 in 1982). After discovering the high profits Atari had made from games he developed, including Outlaw, Canyon Bomber and Slot Machine, he asked the president of Atari, Ray Kassar, for recognition on these titles and better pay. When he was turned down, Crane and other Atari programmers left the company to form Activision in 1979. 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!

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". Early development of Pitfall! started with Crane trying to create realistically animated graphics on the Atari 2600. This led to developing a moving man (which became the basis of Pitfall Harry) and, later, the scorpions and snake obstacles. 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. Crane began implementing it into a game in 1982. 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. The jungle setting of the game was influenced by the 1981 film Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Other influences came from Heckle and Jeckle cartoons, where two magpies outwit their enemies, including having the magpies run across the heads of crocodiles and just escaping their snapping jaws. This led to the ability of Pitfall Harry being able to cross ponds infested with crocodiles if their jaws were closed. Initially, to jump from one alligator head to another, the player had to move the joystick and jump at exactly the same time which Crane described as being "almost impossible to play. So I changed the code to allow you to direct Harry’s jump to the side, if you moved the joystick within a small instant from the time you pressed the button to jump. From a programming standpoint this was a tiny change, but it changed the gameplay from nearly impossible to an easily learned skill." Crane tried to make the sprite artwork for obstacles and the environment recognizable to players, despite the limitations of the Atari 2600. The process involved what Crane said was "a lot of trial-and-error". When asked if the arcade game Donkey Kong (1981) had inspired his game, Crane responded he did not draw any parallels to Pitfall! at the time and had already developed elements in his game that were present in both games, such as a human character, paths, and ladders.