Frogger

What's the ad for?
Frogger, the video game
Year
1984

Spotted in

 

 

The Scoop

Frogger was a pretty fun game when it first came out. I remember playing it at a friends house on the Atari 2600. What I didn't realize was all the gaming systems there were back in 1984. I knew of the aforementioned Atari 2600, Colecovision and a few others. Lets take a quick look at a couple of systems I didn't know of.

• Atari 5200:  Released in 1982 as a higher end complimentary console for the 2600. We don't have complimentary consoles nowadays. Or is that the equivalent to the overlap seen with next gen consoles (ie: PS2 and PS3). This system was made to compete with the Intellivision. It failed.
• TI99/4A: What a sexy name for a game console. Well to be fair it was actually an early home computer made by Texas Instruments who I remember more for making calculators, but that's just me. This bad boy was released in 1979 at the price point of $1,150. It was also the first domestic computer with a 16-bit processor. And you can tell!
• Atari 400/800/600XL: This was Atari's home computer. There was a low-end version known as Candy, and a higher-end machine known as Colleen (named after two attractive Atari secretaries). Can you guess which one was Colleen?

 

I found this link to a site that has all the old Sears Wishbooks scanned. It's cool to look back at all the toy sand video game we remember as children. Anyway, take a look if you want.