Frogger asks one thing of the player: get across. A frog starts at the bottom of the screen, below five lanes of traffic moving at different speeds. Above the road is a river, and the only way over it is to ride logs and the backs of turtles, some of which dive. At the top are five homes, and when all five hold a frog the screen starts again, faster. It is played with a single four-way joystick and no buttons. In 1982 Electronic Games pointed out that Pac-Man, the most popular coin-op in America, had the simplest controls of any current hit, and that “this is also true of Frogger”.
Konami made it, but almost nobody knew. Sega distributed it, and in America it carried the Sega/Gremlin name, so, as Retro Gamer later put it, anyone asked who made Frogger “would reply ‘Sega’”. It became, in the same magazine’s words, “the must-have arcade title of 1981”.
Fast facts
- Developer: Konami, 1981.
- Distributor: Sega; Sega/Gremlin in North America.
- Hardware: a board descended from Namco’s Galaxian. A Z80 runs the game, and a second Z80 drives an AY-3-8910 sound chip.
- Controls: one four-way joystick.
- Home versions: Parker Brothers held the cartridge rights; Sierra On-Line published disk versions for the Apple II, Atari 8-bit computers and Commodore 64. Retro Gamer counted over 20 official versions.
Crossing the screen
The road comes first. Each lane moves at its own speed and in its own direction, so gaps open and close at different rates and a safe spot does not stay safe for long. Halfway up is a strip of pavement where the frog can rest. The river is the harder half: the frog drowns if it misses, so it has to ride a log or a row of turtles across and step off at the right moment. Electronic Games warned that the second row of turtles “dives at random intervals”, and that the careful player watches where they like to go under. Crocodiles swim among the logs.
Bonus points come from catching a fly that appears in one of the homes, and from rescuing a lady frog. A timer runs down on every crossing. Retro Gamer noticed one side effect: with the time limit, players rarely heard more than half of the background tune before the frog ran out of time.
Who sold the home versions
Parker Brothers bought the home rights from Sega almost by accident. It had just lost Donkey Kong to Coleco, its president Richard Stearns told Video Games in 1983, and at the time “Frogger was nothing. It was kind of a mediocre arcade game.” Sega said the game was going elsewhere, so Parker Brothers raised its offer: “we called up David Rosen and almost heard his chin hit the table.” It showed its Frogger cartridge at the Toy Fair the following February, and its Atari 2600 version carried Sega’s name on the box. In February 1983 it was seventh in Electronic Games’ readers’ poll of the most popular cartridges.
The rights were split. Parker Brothers had the cartridges, and Sierra On-Line published versions for the Apple II, the Atari 8-bit computers and the Commodore 64 under its Sierravision label. Electronic Games found Sierra’s Apple II version “a faithful translation” with all the play, sounds and graphics of the original. In 1983 both companies were advertising their own Frogger for the Commodore 64 (see Konami). Coleco made a battery-powered tabletop Frogger for $70. Retro Gamer thought the official 2600 cartridge “crude-looking”, and the official version for the Supercharger, a cassette add-on for the 2600, “hugely superior”. It also counted the Cornsoft version for the ZX81 as possibly the first licensed arcade conversion for a home computer. It split the playfield over two screens and drew a crocodile half the width of the screen.
Frogs on the Spectrum
The ZX Spectrum never had a licensed version, and that did not stop anyone. The first issue of CRASH, in February 1984, reviewed a whole shelf of them: Rabbit’s Frogger, Ocean’s Road Frog, Anirog’s Frogrun, DK’Tronics’ Road Toad, C-Tech’s Frogger/Specman, CDS’s Leapfrog and DJL’s Froggy, which it recommended for its turtles that sink under the frog’s weight, its crocodiles in the homes and a “cruel” time limit. PSS sold Hopper, which added a railway line between the road and the river and gave the player ten frogs. A look back at the year in the same issue gave the “oddest frogger of the year award” to Virgin’s Yomp, which swapped the frogs for paratroopers and laid a minefield on the far side of the road.
Later history
Sega’s hold on the name did not last. Konami took back the rights in the 1990s and licensed them to Hasbro Interactive, whose 1997 Frogger for the PlayStation and PC turned the single screen into a series of new levels. A straight conversion of the arcade game, published by Majesco, was among the last games released for the Mega Drive in North America in 1998. Konami has gone on publishing Frogger games under its own name, among them Frogger: Ancient Shadow and Frogger Helmet Chaos in 2005.
The machine also reached television. In “The Frogger”, a 1998 episode of Seinfeld, George Costanza finds the cabinet in the pizza parlour he went to as a teenager, still showing his high score of over 860,000, and tries to carry it across a busy street without unplugging it.
Sources
- MAME source code,
src/mame/galaxian/galaxian.cpp: the 1981 Frogger sets credited to Konami and “Konami (Sega license)”, the Galaxian-derived board, the second Z80 driving an AY-3-8910. https://github.com/mamedev/mame - Electronic Games vol. 1 no. 4, June 1982: Frogger among the new arcade games and the coin-ops due for home versions; Pac-Man‘s single four-direction joystick, “also true of Frogger”. Vol. 1 no. 12, February 1983: the readers’ poll of the most popular cartridges (Parker Brothers’ Frogger at number 7), the review of Coleco’s tabletop Frogger ($70; the pavement, the diving turtles), the review of Sierra On-Line’s Apple II version.
- Retro Gamer Collection vol. 3 (2009), pp. 194–195, Konami history: Sega’s distribution, “the must-have arcade title of 1981”, players crediting Sega, Parker Brothers’ VCS version with Sega’s name on the box.
- Retro Gamer Collection vol. 2 (2008), pp. 35–38, “The Definitive Frogger”: over 20 official versions; the VCS cartridge and the Supercharger version; the background tune and the time limit; the ZX81 version and its crocodiles, flies, lady frogs and diving turtles; the bonus flies in the homes; the five lanes of road and river; the 1997 PlayStation and PC remake; the 1998 Mega Drive and SNES versions.
- Video Games (US) vol. 2 no. 1, October 1983, p. 22: interview with Richard Stearns of Parker Brothers (Donkey Kong, Sega and David Rosen, “a mediocre arcade game”, the Toy Fair launch).
- CRASH issue 1, February 1984, pp. 53–54: the Spectrum Frogger versions, and the year’s review with “Oddest frogger of the year”.
- Personal Computer Games issue 3, February 1984, p. 42: PSS’s Hopper (16K Spectrum, £5.95).
- Sinclair User issue 13, April 1983, p. 35: DJL’s Spectrum version (£5.95; five frog homes).
- Electronic Games December 1983 Parker Brothers advertisement, and Sierra On-Line advertisements in Compute! June 1983 and Compute!’s Gazette July 1983: as cited in the Konami entry.
- Sega Retro, “Frogger” (web, secondary): the versions and their publishers, Cornsoft’s ZX81 version, no licensed Spectrum version, Konami taking the licence back in the mid-1990s and licensing Hasbro and Majesco, the 1998 Mega Drive release. https://segaretro.org/Frogger
- Konami press release, 27 September 2005, as published by Nintendo World Report (web, secondary): Frogger Helmet Chaos and Frogger: Ancient Shadow. https://www.nintendoworldreport.com/news/10831/frogger-games-ready-for-the-picking
- Seinfeld, season 9 episode 18, “The Frogger”, first shown 23 April 1998; plot as summarised by Wikipedia, “The Frogger” (web, secondary). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Frogger