772: Frogger

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Frogger
I understand you and your team worked hard on this, but when we said to make it more realistic, we meant the graphics.
Title text: I understand you and your team worked hard on this, but when we said to make it more realistic, we meant the graphics.

Explanation[edit]

Frogger is a classic video game introduced in 1981. The aim of the game is to safely get a frog across a busy road and a river to a lily pad at the top of the screen.

The title text reveals that a team of programmers misinterpreted a task to make the game "more realistic", i.e. with better graphics, and instead made the trucks swerve to avoid the car-sized frog, causing another vehicle to crash into the truck resulting in a serious road accident. This is instead of the traffic just inexorably moving at a constant rate in their assigned lanes and disregarding the movements of the frog (as in typical Frogger gameplay), who is normally the only one who ever needs to take evasive action or suffer the consequences.

The game continues to introduce increasing drama with the reactions of off-panel bystanders.

This is similar to the idea behind the modification of the game in 873: FPS Mod, in which realism makes a video game much less enjoyable.

Transcript[edit]

[The dark green frog, Frogger, is standing in the middle of the panel on the green grass by the side of a light gray road with at least four tracks divided by black midlines. The last track being mainly outside the top frame of the panel. It is looking out into the traffic, which includes three trucks (two in the nearest lane one in the third) with different color of the cabin (one blue and two dark gray) and white behind the cabin. There is also a red car in the second lane. All four vehicles are driving towards left.]
[Lines behind the frog and sound indicates that Frogger hops, and it moves out right in front of the right truck which is now close to it. The left truck is partly outside the panel, and the other two have moved further left and a new gray car has entered from the right in the second lane.]
Hop
[The truck in the inner lane swerves into the second lane to avoid Frogger, which takes the truck out in front of the gray car. The other truck in the inner lane has exited the panel and the red car only shows the rear part. ]
[The truck and the car collide with a great noise displayed with shaky letters above them. The car and the cabin of the truck both crumples. Behind the car is two lines of skid marks. Frogger is left unharmed in the inner lane. The red car is gone and the third lane truck is leaving the panel to the left, the cabin just outside the frame.]
Boom
[Only the two crashed vehicles are left on the road with smoke pouring out of their hoods. The trucks rear end also seems to have crumbled more than in the previous image, and strangely enough the skid marks of the car now stretches longer towards the right than before... Frogger turns around and hops back to the side of the road, again indicated with lines and sound. At the bottom of the panel three off-panel voices calls out:]
Hop
Off-panel voice 1: Oh god!
Off-panel voice 2: Someone call 911!
Off-panel voice 3: Mom!

Trivia[edit]

Randall made a mistake in the last panel, where the skid marks of the car stretches longer towards the right than in the panel before, even though the car and truck did not move (and the view has also stayed the same through out the comic.) However, this could just be smoke plumes.


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Discussion

There's actually a video of this already, made by Robot Chicken. It doesn't have the innocent bystanders, though, and it doesn't have the title text either. Davidy22(talk) 10:00, 30 October 2012 (UTC)

In other words, it in no way has anything even faintly resembling the same joke or premise, except that it involved frogger and a crash. — Kazvorpal (talk) 17:23, 22 October 2019 (UTC)

Honestly, most frogs attempting to cross the road would go unnoticed, whether missed or flattened. But if you saw a frog the size of an Izeta in the road, you probably would swerve to miss, if you thought no one was in the next lane. Nyperold (talk) 21:38, 5 July 2020 (UTC)

somebody actually made this game XD https://shadowsora211.itch.io/bad-luck-cat my highscore is 3550. New editor (talk) 06:58, 23 April 2022 (UTC)

xkcd Game Jam version: https://technostalgic.itch.io/frogger-xkcd-style - Mike Rosoft (talk) 22:42, 9 February 2024 (UTC)

there was an xkcd game jam? --162.158.74.49 08:26, 11 March 2024 (UTC)