You are a frog. Your task is simple: hop across a busy
highway, dodging cars and trucks, until you get the to the edge of a river,
where you must keep yourself from drowning by crossing safely to your grotto at
the top of the screen by leaping across the backs of turtles and logs. But
watch out for snakes and alligators!
(Sega [under license from Konami], 1981)
Frogger is a truly ribbeting game, and very addictive. It was one
of the handful of cute action games that hit big around the same time as
Pac-Man and Donkey
Kong, though it was never franchised as heavily as those games were.
There was a Frogger sticker set, the occasional T-shirt, and a rockin'
musical tribute from Bucker & Garcia on the Pac-Man Fever album.
Frogger also existed very briefly as a Saturday morning cartoon on CBS,
in which he and his amphibian pals were reporters on the swamp beat, but this
incarnation of Frogger was even shorter-lived than the cartoon based on
Pac-Man. It's ironic - almost two decades before the Dreamcast, Sega was
sitting on a licensing gold mine. But they didn't realize it, and the
potential, one might say, croaked.
Frogger was ported to every home video game
platform under the sun thanks to Parker Brothers, who also created their own
sort of quasi-sequel cartridge, Frogger II: Threedeep!, which was an
oddity in that it wasn't based on an arcade sequel. More recently,
Frogger was revived in an expanded 3-D
form in 1999, though this version received some criticism since, unlike
Tempest 2000 or some 64-bit home console versions of
Pac-Man, the original game was nowhere to be
found, and it wasn't even an option. You were stuck with the 3-D rendered game,
which, after a few seconds, bore little resemblance to the original
Frogger. Thank goodness for MAME!
Back in the early days of gaming, however, Frogger could be found in
almost every form, including the Coleco tabletop arcade game.
The Coleco Frogger game was probably the most faithful of any of its
tabletop LED offerings, since it was easy to replicate the game with fixed
graphic elements.
Four quarters - a couple of minor irritants, but mostly a compelling and
addictive game.