The Dorklyst: 6 Minigames More Fun than the Actual Games They Were In

Somewhere down the line, game developers decided they weren’t satisfied with just making games. They wanted to put games in their games. Miniature games. Some of them break up the single player experience, some of them add multiplayer and some of them are just something to do when you’re bored (but not so bored that you want to turn the system off, go outside and meet other people). On rare occasions, minigames can be even more fun than the games they were packaged in. This is a tribute to the minigames that shamed their macrogames.

6) Original Pitfall (Pitfall: The Mayan Adventures)

I was alive in 1994, so I remember when there was only one videogame genre: platformer. Back then it wasn’t a videogame if you weren’t jumping over death pits to move the screen right. Pitfall: The Mayan Adventures didn’t bring anything new to the table. It was full of cliches like jungles, vine swinging and runaway mine carts. While not a bad game by any means, you’d pretty much seen everything there was to see by the third level. The developers must have realized this because that’s where they snuck in a secret portal to the ’80s, one that stripped away all your bits and let you play the classic Atari version of Pitfall. It’s still got the cliche vines and pits, but that’s only because it invented them. Pitfall was the game that defined the genre. For better or worse, every platformer that came afterwards owes a lot to the original Pitfall, none more so Pitfall: The Mayan Adventures.