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Q. Why did the frog cross the road?
A. Because the videogame developer thought it would be fun.
Think of classic old videogames from the eighties and chances are the first game you’ll come up with is either Space Invaders or Pacman. Some might say Donkey Kong perhaps, but one classic that I’m sure most will remember but might not think of straight away is Frogger.
Games back then ran on very low powered hardware and so had to be simple. Most consisted of just a single game screen which the player just played over and over again, with the game getting harder each time you completed the level. Frogger fits firmly into this methodology.
The premise is simple. A number of frogs wish to return to the safety of their riverside homes, but in order to do so they have to get across a busy road. Thanks to the scale of the game your froggie was about the same size as the average car, but colliding with a car was instant death, and you would have to start again from the bottom of the screen.
Once you got the frog half way up the screen there was a little rest point (although on harder levels I think it used to be patrolled by a crocodile) which led onto a river. Logs and turtles were floating apace down the river (in different directions somehow) and you had to hop across these to finally get to one of the five holes at the top of the screen. Quite why the frog died if it entered the river is a mystery. Perhaps it was freezing cold, or full of piranhas who had a dislike for turtle?
Get five frogs to the top of the screen and the game repeated again, but with faster moving obstacles, and some of the turtles would suddenly dip under the water, causing your frog to drown if they were riding on their shells. To add to the difficulty you were also up against the clock, and running out of time was instant game over.
Frogger was created by Japanese developer Konami, but was published worldwide in arcades by Sega in 1981. There were many home computer versions of the game, some based around frogs, and some not, for example Horace Goes Skiing, a Spectrum and Commodore 64 game which featured a strange blue blobs with legs who first had to cross a road to get some skis, then return across the road to go skiing with them.
Surprisingly, there was no official Frogger sequel game until 1997, when Frogger 3D was released. This game involved controlling a frog around a 3D landscape to try and find its children. Since then there have been several games to take the Frogger name, but these have mostly become arcade adventure style games rather than a return to the somewhat simple idea of gettings frogs from one side of the road to another.
Oh! I loved this game, though I had an Acorn Electron and it was called Hopper on my version. You just brought back some very happy memories!
I remember having a version of this game for my old Commodore 64 (it was called something different although I don’t remember what); it was nearly identical to the arcade version, save that it was in 3-D, and had a couple of other minor differences. As I recall, once you’d gotten a couple of frogs home, a snake would periodically slither along the pavement in the middle of the screen, to keep you from tarrying too long there; and some of the “logs” in the river would actually be crocodiles, which were still safe to ride on just so long as you didn’t sit on their heads.
You’re right that arcade games in the 80s were very simple, and to tell the truth I sort of miss that aspect of them. A few years back, I stumbled upon a video game arcade (themselves very much an endangered species nowadays), but when I went inside for a look, I found it was filled with all those ghastly sorts of games that have people sitting in the seats of racing cars (or blowing things away on screen with huge guns); make a deafening racket; and cost a small fortune to play. Not really my thing, I’m afraid!
I quite agree with you Zosimus about the state of arcades these days. You used to be able to go in with a quid in your pocket and play ten different games, now that same quid will get you five minutes (if you’re lucky) on a single game. I don’t understand the prevalence of driving games myself, though I have been known to indulge myself in a bit of Time Crisis (one of the games you blow things away with guns!) simply because you can get better at it and make your pound coin last a bit longer.
frogger was great, i also had horace goes skiing on the speccy, it was great slaloming through the posts. I got real good at donkey kong and yier ar kung fu in 85, that was a good year I turned 18 and was working in a bar starting at 8 am cleaning, then serving til about 2pm then back at 6 or 7 til about 1 am or 2am I would go down to the slots around 3pm and play yier ar kung fu and if it was not too busy play donkey kong at work. weirdly I didnt watch live aid think I was ill.