The arcade classic, Frogger, was developed by Konami in 1981, and was praised at the time for its innovative play and novel theme.
You direct the movement of your frog across several lanes of traffic, and then across an alligator infested stream, on the backs of turtles and logs, to one of five dens on the far side of the water. On your journey, you'll need to avoid sports cars, semi-trucks, snakes, and the aforementioned alligators. And maybe, just maybe you'll find love along the way.
Frogger was ported to the Atari 2600 console along with most other consoles and computers at the time. But here is where it gets complicated. It's also where our review begins.
Frogger was licensed to Sega for north American distribution. Sega then broke up their distribution rights into categories, granting Parker Brothers a license to create cartridge based home versions, while granting Sierra a license to create and distribute magnetic media versions. Sierra then sublicensed their distribution rights to other companies to create versions for different computers. This resulted in consoles and computers with both cartridge and magnetic media capabilities - cassette tape, floppy disks, etc. - sometimes having multiple ports available.
This happened with the Atari 2600. The Parker Brothers cartridge is the one you know on the 2600s, and for an Atari 2600 game, it is a surprisingly faithful port. No, the graphics can't compete with the arcade machine but the gameplay has all of the hallmarks of the original.
What you may not know is that there was another version, developed by Arcadia for its Starpath Supercharger cassette system. As we've discussed before, the Starpath was a short-lived cassette based system for the Atari. It expanded the base 2600's ram by almost 50 times, from 128 bytes to over 6,000, allowing the system to display more detailed graphics, and more intricate game play. There were only 10 retail releases for the Supercharger and Frogger was the only true arcade port.
The Supercharger, with its expanded capabilities, delivers an almost perfect arcade Frogger experience. The graphics are much more highly detailed and the gameplay feels snappier.
Nostalgia makes me lean toward the Parker Brothers version since, like you, it's the one I played the most as a kid. But I have to admit, I find myself playing the Supercharger version more often these days, and for someone new to Frogger it's the version I'd recommend. That is, unless you have access to a real Frogger arcade machine.
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