Bottomless pit (video games)

A bottomless pit, as its name implies, is a pit that has no identifiable bottom. Such pits are known by a large variety of names, and are a common hazard in many Video games. They Appear most often in fantasy and video game settings such as the Legend of Zelda and SUPER Mario game series as obstacles. The hazard is most popularized by the classic game Pitfall!.

If a player falls into a bottomless pit, the character loses a life or loses health and/or is forced to restart from his or her last checkpoint/continue point/save point. Bottomless pits also ignore invincibility or any other protection the player may have. In some games, penalties can be avoided through a special item. e.g., in Mega Man 7, the robotic bird Beat can pick Mega Man up before losing a life.

The Sonic the Hedgehog series has been particularly plagued with bottomless pits since Sonic Adventure 2, wherein the standard of Sonic platform levels was a series of platforms floating over a single level-spanning bottomless pit. Sonic Heroes is particularly notorious in this aspect.

Bottomless pits are always oriented to where the player's character will fall. In normal conventions, the pit will be going down, but if the character falls upward (relative to the camera's view), then the pit will be going upward. While bottomless pits are mostly encountered in closed spaces, games like Super Mario 64 and Jumping Flash!, have some stages that are floating islands, and thus not landing on the island is falling into a bottomless pit. However, in first-person shooters, pits are not bottomless and will terminate when Fall damage is terminal, in order to preserve a sense of realism. Although when the floating island approach is used, a means of death will be provided.

In Half-Life, during the floating island sequence in Xen, the game will instantly end when the player falls into the abyss. Due to the endless fall, the game ends within a few meters of the fall.(In the older version of the game, the player rarely will fall into a faulty area, nicknamed "area zer0" that is impossible to get out of unless re-starting the game.

As games got more complex, other hazards were added to compliment the bottomless pit. Depending on the context and situation, these can include water, lava, spikes, quicksand, and crushing. Some of these hazards will not affect the character if temporarily invincible.

For such a pit to truly exist, it would have to plunge completely through the entire earth, which is why they are avoided in realistic games.

See also

• Mel's hole (purported real-life bottomless pit)
• Fall damage
• 1-up
• Health (game mechanism)
• Hit point
• Life bar