Speaker 1: All right, everybody, welcome back to our series on the
games of nineteen eighty one. Level three Froger.
Speaker 2: All right, everybody, welcome back to the Shirley You Can't
Be Serious podcast. Today we're continuing our series on video
games of nineteen eighty one. Today we're going to be talking.
Speaker 1: About Froger, one of the best video games of all time.
Speaker 2: It is. When I was looking at this, did you
ever think when the two frogs are on the log
that they're actually copulating during the game.
Speaker 1: So you say the frogs are hogging on the log? Okay, friendly,
here we go, Okay, all right, so Froger, So Froger.
Speaker 2: Froger released June fifth, nineteen eighty one.
Speaker 1: Yes, So, we talked in our previous episode about the
development of pac Man, and there are a couple of
things that we need to kind of understand before we
jump in here. So we've got multiple video game companies
on both sides of the pond, Right, You've got video
game companies in Japan, video game companies in the States.
But the interesting thing is not all of the games
that are successful in Japan are going to be successful
in the United States, and vice versa. Right, Right, I mean,
we talked about how Radar Scope was second only to
pac Man over in Japan, but once Nintendo got it
over here, they couldn't sell but a third of their
small quantity of them in the States, right, And so oddly,
the same thing almost happened with pac Man. And it's
because of this cultural difference of cuteness tolerance, Like Japan
loves cuteness. It's all about the cuteness. And we talked
about the Magna art we taught you can look at
all of the various characters that have come over from
Japan that are big and fluffy and cute and even.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean all the anime, all the Pokemon stuff.
The Japanese culture loves cute, cute.
Speaker 1: And when pac Man came out, he was cute, right,
And the ghosts were cute. They had the eyes that
looked like cartoon eyes, and it was just a perfect
little maze like you would have his little kid. Fantastic
for Japan. But when people from the Amoa Show in
nineteen eighty looked at what pac Man had to offer,
they ignored it. They're like, Eh, that's too cute, I
don't I mean, our American folks are not going to
be interested in playing this cute sea game, and bally
Midway literally took a chance because it needed titles and
pac Man was cheap, and so it said, you know,
what the heck have you seen the hutsucker proxy? No,
he keeps drawing a circle and he keeps going, you know,
for the kids, and it's like a ball on a
hula hoop ands all this stuff. Right, so they thought,
this is a cute see kids game. This is a
Namco game. Yes, it comes over and becomes the most
successful game in history up until that point. So how
does this all relate to Frogger? You're asking me, I'm
asking you, would you agree that Frogger is cute? Frog
is cute. It's definitely cute. Right, It's not a manly
man game. It's cute.
Speaker 2: It's a frog jumping across the street.
Speaker 1: Right, Frogs are cute. And so whenever it came, it
had been created over in Japan, right, right, Actually, the
guy who came up with the storyline was just trying
to think of an idea and was driving in traffic
and literally saw a frog trying to make it across
the road, stopped his car. If my wife listens, to
this episode, she's gonna be like, oh my gosh, I
had to do this as an early married person. All
the time. I didn't rescue frogs, but I rescued a
ton of turtles. I have scars on my arm arms
where I've been bitten by a dog trying to rescue
a dog that was stuck next to the side of
the road. So he gets out, he rescues this frog.
He gets it to the other side of the road,
and he thinks, I've got my video game idea. They
create it, they develop it, they send it over to
the States, and everybody that looks at it goes too cute,
too cute, too cute. So our hero in this particular
story is a young lady who is a grad student
at the University of San Diego. Okay, she's working for
the paper. Okay, they have this yearly book that comes
out where they try to promote commerce by highlighting different
businesses around and her job is to go look at
these new computer enterprises that are popping up all over
San Diego. And this is before the Internet, obviously, so
this involves her driving around in her car looking for
shop fronts. Sure, and one of the one that she
happens upon is this new video gaming company called Grimlin. Okay,
so she goes in and she's she likes video games,
she's a gamer herself. So she starts talking to the
founder named Frank Fogelman. She's asking him all these questions
and at some point she says, so, how do you
know if a game is going to be a success
or not? And he didn't have an answer for her,
and so she says, you need to hire me, and
he's like, no, you're overqualified. I don't know. She's like, listen,
you need a marketing research person. I have experience with
this other company. I know what I'm doing. You need
to hire me. He says no. She calls him back
the next week and he says no, and she calls
him every week for two months, and finally, after two
months he says, fine, bring your resume in. He hires her,
and her first job is to find a game for Grimlin,
who has recently been purchased by Sega and now Sega Grimlin. Yes,
find a game for them to license from the library
that they have of all these submissions that they get,
And so she goes in this dark, nasty library room
trying to find these things. She's literally putting in VHS
tapes trying to find some good pitch for a game,
and she comes across Froger. She brings it to him
and she's like, this is great. Why haven't we licensed
this one? And he's like, well, because we've already had
a frog game and it was a total flop.
Speaker 2: That game is called Frogs.
Speaker 1: Yes, have you ever played it? I think I've seen
it before. It's the frog is jumping up in the
air trying to catch flies. It's kind of like kind
of like duck Hunt, you know, like the flies are
flying around and you're trying to guide your frog, okay,
to catch the flies, and he's just floating along on
a lily pad. It's not I can see why it
wasn't a big success, all right, It's OK, but duck
Hunt esque. And then they also noticed nobody else's license
this Frogger game either, So that's another indicator this is not.
Speaker 2: Going to be why would we want it?
Speaker 1: Right? So they were banking on this game called Eliminator.
They thought it was going to be their next big hit.
It's the only four player vector game that has ever
been made. It's like Starcastle or Tempest, you know, except
they were like, you could have on the table set,
you could have four people on each end of the table,
and it was in color. So they're like, oh, you know, Tempest,
big success, Ours is in color. This is going to
be great. But it wasn't at all. And so she
keeps saying, we need to do Frogger. They say, listen,
if you can convince management to go for it, then sure,
that's fine. But they knew how that was going to go,
right because management were the executives from Paramount, Like, it's
the same company owns Paramount, owns Sega Grimlin, and so
it's a bunch of old men's who probably knew something
about business, but didn't know anything about video games. Sure,
and so she comes in, she's this young, like twenty
early twenties girl in this manly man world. To make
her pitch for this game. She's got little booklets that
she's made on why she thinks it's going to be
a success. She hands them out to each of these
old executives from Paramount. She starts her pitch and one
of them immediately throws it back in her face and says, look,
we've already rejected this. It is just a woman in
kids game. Why are you wasting our time? And she says,
oh am I talking to the same group that rejected
pac Man. Oh wow, and that shut everybody up. And
so when she realizes that, everybody's like, oh crap, she
just went there, and so she starts making her pitch,
realizing that they're kind of backtracking on their aggressive rejection,
and she says, listen, easily memorizable patterns, attractive presentation, yes,
great soundtrack, all of the exact same things that pac
Man had going for it. We have going for this.
And all I'm asking you for is ninety days for
us to license it from Konomi and see if we
can get somebody to bite on it. That's it, ninety days.
And one of the executives says, you know what, giver
her GD kids game, we'll see what happens. And they
let her have it sixty days. Paid thirty five hundred
dollars for a sixty day license. Nice. So they get
it put together, they take it to one bar. This
time it's called Spanky Saloons Spaky Saloon in San Diego. Okay,
who's your favorite little rascal?
Speaker 2: Spaky?
Speaker 1: Is it Alfalfa or Spanky. This saloon has almost exclusively
guys in it. But they play tested there. Okay, it
goes nuts, it goes nuts, got all kinds of attention,
it's all it took. And when they showed it at
the AMOA, which is the Amusement and Music Operators Association show,
when they showed it there, it immediately took off, and
Frogger is born. Nice. Nice. It becomes Sega Grimlin's biggest
hit of the time. It's so big that Parker Brothers
buys the home video game rights. Not only they'd buy it,
they bid on it. They've been a quarter of a
million dollars to get the home video game rights. Parker
Brothers did because they had lost some other game and
they were really angry about losing the game. They got
turned down for the quarter of a million dollars, and
the president was so intent he offered them half a
million dollars from the home video rights to this game,
which was obviously a huge boom. And let's just think
about that for a second. In nineteen eighty one, they
got half a million dollars. They were a company that
didn't really exist on the rate are and they get
half a million dollars. If not for the young grad
student standing up to these suits, we probably would not
have had Sega Genesis. Yeah, wouldn't have Sonic The Hedgehog. Wow,
think about it. That's amazing. You're exactly right.
Speaker 2: Frogger and its success due to this girl.
Speaker 1: Yeah gave us signed the Hedgehog. Yeah. Wow, that's fantastic.
Speaker 2: Hey, you know the the home video game, the Parker
Brothers Atari twenty six hundred Yes, cartridge, they marketed the
Frogger game and the Empire Strikes Back cartridge at the
same time. They spent ten million dollars marketed in them.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: George Lucas and Lucasfilm spent six million dollars marketing the
actual movie Empire Strikes Back.
Speaker 1: Uh huh.
Speaker 2: So that's how big video games were. Okay, before we
talk about gameplay, let's talk about the music.
Speaker 1: Okay.
Speaker 2: And once again, I'm not Japanese. I've never been to Japan.
Like I said last time, the most Japanese thing I
know is mister Roboto. So here's the deal. One of
the things that is kind of distinctive about Frogger is
the music involved in yep. Okay, So the game's opening
tune is the first verse of a Japanese children's song
called Inu no i'm asan.
Speaker 1: Let me translate that for thank you, dog Policeman.
Speaker 2: The dog Policeman, thank you.
Speaker 1: Cutesy kid music it is.
Speaker 2: It's sort of like Mary had a Little lamb or
Yankee Doodle or something like that over here. It's just
something everybody knows. It's a kid's song, but it's super catchy.
Other tunes that are played during gameplay include the theme
to the anime Hano No Call Lunn.
Speaker 1: And you can quote me on that.
Speaker 2: Oh my god, I got this one though, and finally
Rascal the Raccoon.
Speaker 1: Right right, Okay. When they brought it over to the States,
they replaced I think that second one with Yankee Doodle.
There you go. Yeah, a little easier for the Americans
to pronounce it. Yes.
Speaker 2: And the reason why I bring these up is because
when you play Frogger, you have that super prominent music
playing the entire time.
Speaker 1: It's part of the game experience, absolutely, and one of
it's kind of interesting. If you go back and look,
I mean, we're going to talk about Defender. I don't
think there is any music in Defender no, just sound effects. Right,
So eighty one games are just really starting to get
soundtracks at that time. I mean pac Man had it,
but not a whole lot of games did, and so
that cuteness plus the kid music really added to the
appeal in a way that they didn't expect.
Speaker 2: Before you get into gameplay, I wanted to mention something
to you. Yes, Activision was a company that had split
off of Atari and created cartridges for the twenty six hundred.
One of the Activision games that I had was a
game called Freeway, right right, And this was a game
where you would playing you had a chicken and you
were trying to cross the road.
Speaker 1: Yes, chicken cress in the road, get it. It's like
a joke. I wonder why why.
Speaker 2: I don't know why. Maybe to get to the other side.
But the interesting thing, so I always thought that either
Froger copied Freeway or Freeway copied Froger, but that in
this case that wasn't Yeah, that didn't happen in this case.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Allegedly they were developed at the same time on
opposite sides of the Pacific Ocean. Yes, that's that's what
I read too, And one of I don't really get
to play games on my phone much anymore. But when
I first had and we first started playing games, one
of the first games that I remember getting was Crossy Road,
which you go, yeah, a chicken going across the road,
except it was more three D, and I was like, gosh,
this is Frogger. This is Frogger right here. Yes, but yeah,
they ended up having to sue quite a few folks
just to make sure that their game wasn't infringed upon,
and one about one point eight million dollars doing it too. Wow.
Speaker 2: All right, so let's talk about gameplay for a second.
Go okay, So in Frogger, you are a frog hopping
across a street, yes, occupied by cars going different direction, yes,
some fast, some slow. Then you get to this median
where you have a safe spot, break a break, and
then you have to jump on either turtles or logs,
and then finally you jump into a home space frog
home where the frog lives right right and you have
to do that continually until.
Speaker 1: You fill I think five frog homes. Five frog homes. Yes.
Speaker 2: The cool thing is is that the turtles will dive
and sometimes there's a croctile, sometimes there's a snake, and
it's just.
Speaker 1: It's just fun.
Speaker 2: You're just hopping across.
Speaker 1: To go home, you know. At the time, I mean
we're talking about it being a kid's game, but at
the time it had more ways to die than any
other video game in the ARCT.
Speaker 2: Yes, more ways to die.
Speaker 1: And when you get hit by a car, it was
like this gruesome death skull and crossbones epic sound effect.
Speaker 2: And it wasn't like, yeah, Mario just sort of had
this dizzy thing and fell on his back. Yeah, this
was like a full on splat.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yes, so you could die. You could die by
getting hit by a car. You could die by running
into a car. Yes, you could die by jumping into
the water in some weird universe where frogs can't swim.
I guess right. You could die by riding a log
off into the side of the screen. Yes. You could
get eaten by a snake on one of the logs. Yes,
there are. Sometimes the logs were crocodiles, and if you
jumped on the mouth side, Yep, you could die that way.
If you hit the hedge instead of hitting inside the
frog home, you could die that way. Sometimes there were
alligators inside the home and you could die in that way.
I think that's eight. I don't know what too, I'm missing,
But there were all kinds of ways to die on it. Yes,
the turtle could dive on you and you could drown. Right,
the turtles go under you and you could run out
of time. Oh right, the time limit. There you go.
Speaker 2: Yep, most ways to die in a video.
Speaker 1: In nineteen eighty one and nineteen eighty one. All right, Jason,
as far as Frogger goes, there is a number you
ready for this, Yes, eight hundred sixty thousand, six hundred
and thirty. Do you know the significance of that number?
High score? Yes, but who's I don't know, Hey, look
at the high score GLC George Lewis Constanza. That's not you,
is it, Yes? Oh, that would be George Costanza, who
held the Frogger record at the Pizzeria in Seinfeld on
the Froger Seinfeld episode, which ends with them stealing the
game and trying to run it across the highway, much
in the same way that the frog tries to cross
the road.
Speaker 2: That episode is hilarious. George trying to cross the road
with the video game. Yes, it doesn't make it, that's awesome.
Speaker 1: Spoiler alert. It doesn't make it. I played a ton
of Froger. Yeah, me too.
Speaker 2: This was nominated as one of the greatest video games
of all time.
Speaker 1: It absolutely is. I can't believe how many good games
came out in that scene year. It's just amazing. It
is amazing iconic games.
Speaker 2: Frogger. Let's just recap real quick.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Donkey Kong.
Speaker 2: Gave us Super Mario Brothers, which ultimately gave us Nintendo,
the Nes, the Super Nes, the Nintendo sixty four and
all the things that come of that legend of Zelda,
all that stuff. Yes, Froger gave birth to Sega, which
then in turn gave us Signed the Hedgehog and the
Sega Home Genesis and all the stuff that comes with that.
Speaker 1: Yes, these are hugely impactful games. Absolutely. And the other
games that came out that year were Miss pac Man,
which led to a ton of pac Man spinoffs, Yep
or was a part of a ton of pac Man spinoffs, Galaga,
which became the gold standard for the space shooter games
that had absolutely started with Space Invaders YEP, and Defender,
which literally turned Space Invaders on its head.
Speaker 2: And that doesn't even cover games like Kicks and mouse
Trap and gorf.
Speaker 1: Is it kicks or quicks? I call it kicks? What
is it called? I don't know what do you call it?
I call it quicks? Okay, it's qi X. Yeah. It's
a fantastic game that did not get the notoriety that
these That game's freaking fun. But it is a great,
great game where if you don't remember it, it's the
one where you're you're just a dot on the frame
of the screen and you come out of the frame
to make little boxes, and your objective is to fill
up most of that space without getting hit by the
little floating.
Speaker 2: Play a little zappra running around.
Speaker 1: Yeap. So that wraps up this episode. We have more
video games coming next week in our series on the
best video games of nineteen eighty one.
Speaker 2: Come back next week where we talk about mispac Man.
Speaker 1: Thanks for joining us.
Speaker 2: Go to our Facebook page, go to our Twitter page,
go to our Patreon page. Send us an email us.
Speaker 1: Know how we're doing, ye Jason, you get any quarters?
Speaker 2: Yes, I do, but I'm saving them for myself.
Speaker 1: Put my quarters up on the screen.
Speaker 2: I got next, I got next
Speaker 1: Brogger in the front, liquor in the bag,