The Pit

The Pit is a 1982 arcade game from the British company Zilec, licensed to Centuri for North America and to Taito for Japan. It was designed by Andy Walker and Tony Gibson and developed at AW Electronics. The Commodore 64 version you will find here came out in 1983 under the HesWare label.

The task is simple: descend into an underground labyrinth, take the gem and get back up. The playfield is made of earth you can dig through and of tunnels where monsters wait. On top of that, a tank sits on the surface firing at you — so both the descent and the climb are dangerous, and the clock is running.

The most interesting thing about this game, though, is its descendants. An unpublished game based on The Pit and programmed by Chris Gray became the direct inspiration for Boulder Dash, one of the most influential puzzle games of the eighties. The Pit is therefore the grandfather of the whole dig-and-falling-rocks genre, even though it plays quite differently itself.

It has aged about as expected. The controls are simple but digging is slow, and enemies have a habit of appearing exactly where you have just crawled. The real cruelty is the lack of room: in a narrow tunnel there is nowhere to dodge, and death often arrives with no chance to react.

The C64 conversion is competent, if slower and thinner in sound than the cabinet. If you have ever wondered where terrain-digging in game design came from, this is one of the first points on that map — and as a short arcade loop it still works.