Frogger is Konami’s 1981 classic arcade title where you take control of a frog who must hop across a hazard filled road and alligator infested waters just to get back home. The game’s action is confined to a single screen and yet requires more concentration and fast thinking than many other titles with more fleshed out worlds.
The screen is divided into two, the first section being the road. Vehicles travel horizontally across the road, some going left, some going right, and all at different speeds. You must anticipate where and when to hop not only to avoid the obstacle in front of you but to also put yourself in a good position to avoid the next one or even the next few. This is the core of the quick thinking and deep planning a player must do in this game.
In the middle of the screen is a median where you can take a quick breather (but you must be quick, there is a timer!). After this it’s on to the river where logs, gators, turtles, and some other animals float by in patterns similar to the way the vehicles moved on the road. The frog can’t swim and, in inverse logic to the road section, must now hop across the moving objects to the goal. The logs are perfectly safe so long as they don’t carry you off the screen and the turtles sometimes dive underwater, leaving you to drown. It need not be said that you must avoid predators and the gator’s jaws.
The final bit of thinking in the game involves positioning your frog to get into one of the five homes at the top of the screen. Every time you get five frogs to safety the game resets and you must navigate five more frogs northward, but this time with more challenging obstacles. Frogger has always been more successful in this original arcade form than any of the follow-up games that came afterward and, like many other classic titles, has been ported virtually everywhere from browsers to mobile applications. It is a title that must be played by anyone interested in classic games or just wants to spend some time with a game that requires a lot of focus instead of auto-pilot button mashing.