Actor Jack Black appeared in a commercial promoting the game in 1982 when he was 13 years old.
The second DVD of Season 3 of The Venture Bros., features Brock Sampson as the Pitfall! player.
Game designer / programmer David Crane thought it would be funny if the game would produce a noise similar to Johnny Weissmuller's Tarzan yell of the 1930s whenever Pitfall Harry grabbed a vine. Crane tried to emulate this iconic yell in electronic tones, but many of the people he showed the game to didn't get the connection. Even so, the sound became iconic to the series.
It spent 64 weeks at the top of the best-sellers list, and went on to sell over four million copies on the way to becoming Activision's best-selling Atari 2600 title. In the end it was the second most successful Atari 2600 title of all time, right behind Pac-Man.