 The Frogger episode of Seinfeld was on the other night and I happened to catch it. It's still a favorite of mine. There's so much good stuff going on in that one. There's The Lopper. There's Shlomo and Slippery Pete. There's the Enteman's cake. And I always thought that Lisi was really cute. But there's also the fact that the bulk of the episode revolved around a classic arcade cabinet, and a grown man's attempt to hang onto his past gaming victories as some sort of grand achievement.
The episode is completely iconic right down to the final scene in which George recreates Frogger by trying to push the cabinet across a busy New York City street. Certainly it's meta, and no other video game would have worked to make that scene such an obvious conclusion. Even if the real life fact that Frogger didn't actually allow you to input your initials was a thing. My own personal introduction to the game would have been in the late 80s. My mom married my second step father, and we moved into a new house between second and third grade for me. And somehow, that house came with a big box in the basement that included an Atari VCS and a whole big stack of games. Truth be told, I wasn't happy about our new living arrangement at the time. I didn't want to move into a new house in a new city. I didn't want to go to a new school and leave all my friends behind. I can't say for certain that the Atari console and instant library was a fair trade off for the instability I felt at the time, but looking back, I can at least acknowledge that it was cool to basically find an unloved console and an instant library of games that to this day still serves as a kind of crash course in late 70s and early 80s video game history. I played a lot of games back then in that basement. Some were awesome (Space Invaders, Moon Patrol), some were terrible (Superman) and some weren't really my thing, but at least had some kind of historical relevance (Combat, Missile Command). To some degree, Frogger falls into that last category. As an arcade game of its time, I can absolutely see the appeal. Its gameplay is sound, for sure. You (the frog) must simply make your way across a busy highway and perilous lake to the shore on the other hand. All of this is done step by step, or hop by hop as it were. The controls boil down to nothing more than four cardinal directions at its core. I mean, it's basic enough that anyone can figure out how to play pretty much immediately. The goal is simple and easy to understand - just make it from the bottom of the screen to the top. Also, don't get run over. While each loop offers faster cars and extra twists to up the challenge, ultimately you're just doing the same thing over and over again. Sure, the difficulty ramps up, but it's all the same screen, isn't it? I can't remember how much I played or enjoyed the game back in the late 80s. But I can say that in 2023, I basically find it "kind of fun" for a bit, but grow bored with it rather quickly. Interestingly, over the years I've encountered Frogger sequels and variants that have actually captured my attention deeper, though. Like, I remember Hasbro made some reboot games in the PS1/Dreamcast era that I had fun with. Frogger 2: The Return was pretty cool. And later on, in 2014 or so there was Crossy Road, a mobile game that basically took the Frogger concept and turned it into an endless runner, for lack of better description. Ultimately, I can totally see why Frogger would have been an important and appealing arcade game upon release in 1981. But by the late 80s, the NES had already made many of the arcade games from that era feel antiquated. Though oddly there are still plenty of arcade games from the same period I can truly still enjoy all these years later. Heck, 1981 also saw the release of Donkey Kong! I can still have fun with Frogger, just not for very long and compared to Donkey Kong, these two games aren't even in the same league.  Centipede is one of many single-screen vertical shoot-em-ups that came out in the wake of Space Invaders (1978). It felt like every publisher needed their own take on the Space Invaders formula back then to try to dethrone the king, or at least just cash-in on the craze.
Of course what we know from hindsight now is that just being a Space Invaders clone wasn't quite enough. There were probably hundreds of games that looked and played just like Space Invaders, but we don't remember most of them. Instead, we remember the games that riffed on the formula; added something new; did something unique. And so I suppose it's not surprising that Centipede (1981) has hung onto its classic reputation for over forty years now. Just to put things into perspective a bit, let's briefly take a look at what other popular shooters were released in 1981. Namco created Bosconian, which I haven't actually played yet myself, as well as Galaga which is a bonafide masterpiece and one of my favorite early 80s arcade games of all time. And Konami put out Scramble which is a pretty landmark release that inspired all kinds of copycats and feels like it was laying the blueprint for Gradius (1985). Meanwhile, there were also some obscure but awesome games like Cosmic Avenger that also comes to mind having recently discovered the Colecovision port myself. Centipede was created by two people: Ed Logg came up with the design for the game. His name should sound familiar having worked on some major hitters like Asteroids (1979), Gauntlet (1985), and Xybots (1987). Dona Bailey did a large portion of the programming, which was pretty interesting considering that in 1981 there were so few women working with assembly code within the gaming industry. She has mentioned in interviews that she was responsible for a lot of the visuals of the game as well. Bafflingly, after Centipede she did work on several other games at Atari and Activision, but none were completed nor released. So let's talk about how Centipede plays. You've got your little thing at the bottom of the screen. I'd say spaceship, but presumably you're in a garden, so I don't know. You shoot up, just like in Space Invaders. But you can actually move around both vertically and horizontally, allowing more freedom. At the top of the screen is a large centipede made up of many segments that descends down. When you hit a segment on the end, it turns into a mushroom. When you hit a segment in the middle, it splits the centipede into two centipedes who now descend independently of each other. Oh, and there are mushrooms scattered everywhere on the playing field. They get in the way of your bullets, but can be taken out by four shots. When the centipede hits a mushroom he changes direction. On top of all that, there are also other more annoying insects like spiders (okay, an arachnid not an insect) and a scorpion. When you clear out a screen of all insects, the colors change and you move on to a more challenging level. The original arcade game was played with a trackball, which I guess is kind of notable. I can tell you that I did play the arcade version as a kid and I'm sure I thought it was fun at the time. I remember some restaurant we'd go to had a cocktail cabinet version of it. I'm sure I was terrible. But it must have been fun, because I feel like I have semi-fond, semi-fuzzy memories of it. I can say that I've also attempted to play the arcade cabinet as an adult and trackballs just don't work well for me. Today I'm playing Centipede as part of the Atari Flashback Classics Volume I collection on PS4. And it's a solid way to do so. I don't miss the trackball in the slightest. In fact, I'm glad that I can play this with a standard controller - Dualsense in this instance. The arcade version plays pretty great here and I had a good enough time tonight just messing around and trying to beat my own scores to improve ever so slightly. I'm not good at this game but whatever. I also attempted to play the 2600 port on the same collection and yikes. I will say that I'm sure it was a bit of a technical achievement to even try to translate Centipede to the 2600, but the end result isn't really pleasant. Pretty much everything on the screen is just boxes, so you have to really use your imagination to see Centipede when you play this one. The game also feels like it moves too fast. And obviously the number of sprites (namely, mushrooms) is drastically cut down. Oh and the sound effects are really abrasive. But the arcade original still holds up just fine. Although if I'm being totally honest, I've never loved Centipede. I like it. I get why people were into it. I get why it's a classic. But it wouldn't even come up if I made my own personal list of 80s arcade favorites. I don't think this game holds a candle to the likes of Donkey Kong or Galaga or whatever. But did I have a good time tonight revisiting the game? Sure. Will I play it again in the future? I don't see why not.  Although I had dabbled with the Colecovision ever so briefly back in 2012 or so, it wasn't until 2025 that the bug really bit me. I think that my prior view of the system was that it was one of the losers of the second generation console wars. Meaning, the Atari 2600 was the clear winner based solely on market share, install base and sheer number of games. I knew that the Coleco came out at the tail end of the second generation and so it had superior hardware. I also knew it had the best console port of Donkey Kong. But I also felt like it had a weird controller and rather small library of games. So it just didn't interest me all that much.
Oddly it was my love of MSX that led me to Coleco. It's weird, but even though the MSX came out only a year after the Coleco, I tend to think of MSX as competing in the third generation space. Though MSX and Coleco share a lot of hardware DNA. That's probably why the Spectravideo SV-318 computer had adapters to play both system's cartridges. It's fascinating stuff. At any rate, the more I delve into the Coleco's library, the more impressed I become. It was such a short lived system, but also an insane powerhouse for the time that really pushed console gaming to some impressive extremes. This is a machine that came out in 1982, pumped out high quality arcade ports and unique home console experiences but then fell victim to the American video game market crash in 1984. It limped along just barely through 1985 before petering out with a whimper in 1986. But in that brief time it managed to see over a hundred cartridges creating a small but awesome library of bangers. If the crash had never happened, Coleco probably would have been crowned the king of the second generation. But alas. Tonight I'm playing through Exidy's 1982 game Venture which is really something. I mean what a cool game. The idea is sort of like what if you took the concept of Dungeons & Dragons and turned it into an action-based arcade game. Each level is the floor of a dungeon and your goal is to enter each room while avoiding unkillable creatures that roam the halls. Once in a room, the view zooms in and you (a silly smiling face) has to shoot enemies with a bow and arrow in order to collect the treasure in each room. Once you clear out each room of the dungeon floor, you move onto the next. This sounds simple, but there's some really interesting caveats here. For one thing, when you kill an enemy, its corpse remains for a few seconds. Touching the corpse is lethal, so this now stands as a further obstacle to get around. If you shoot the corpse again, it extends the time before it disappears, so you've got to pay attention. Also, if you linger too long in a single room, one of those unkillable creatures from the halls will enter and stalk you. Years later we'd see this kind of concept reused in games like Spelunky (2008) to great effect. Venture is a really interesting game. It certainly wasn't created in a vacuum and takes cues from various sources. Dungeons & Dragons is an obvious one as mentioned above. But also Adventure (1980, Atari 2600) and Berzerk (1980, arcade). That said, you could also make the case that Venture could have just as easily inspired Dandy (1983, Atari 8-bit) which in turn inspired Gauntlet (1985, arcade). To put it another way, Venture deserves to be part of the conversation if you're talking about action RPGs or maybe even dungeon crawlers in general. I suppose my only real critique would be that the music can get fairly repetitious which wouldn't be a problem if it weren't so grating. But beyond that, Venture is a true gem. I don't know if it's a hidden gem exactly. It seems like it was fairly popular with the Coleco crowd and also got some rather glowing reviews from the relatively small gaming press of the day. All I know is that I have never really heard anyone rave about this game, which is anecdotal at best. But personally, I'm glad I picked this one up because it was a totally pleasant surprise. |
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