Wings Over Sealand

If you consult the ZXDB Spectrum database, in the 43 years of the classic Sinclair computer’s history it identifies 64 clones of Konami’s 1981 arcade hit Frogger.

Until yesterday, remarkably, this was still the best one.

But happily, not any more.

Frogger RX, which you can get here for about £3.90, or better yet by supporting author Allan Turvey on Patreon (which also gets you free access to his entire back catalogue including more fantastic arcade ports for the Speccy of games like Lunar Rescue, Scramble, Asteroids, Pac-Man and Joust, along with a bunch of other subscriber-only stuff) is an astounding piece of work, as pixel-perfect to the coin-op as the Speccy could ever hope to achieve, and in 128K mode is also aurally near-indistinguishable from the original thanks to the superb musical efforts of scene stalwart Lee Bee.

(Hopefully also soon to contribute to another excellent Speccy arcade port that, like Frogger RX, I’ve been helping out with some playtesting for.)

But what’s surprising is just how bad all the Frogger games on the machine were before, considering the simplicity of the game (single-screen, no enemy AI to code, not even diagonal movement) and the number of people who had a go at it.

Most of the iconic titles of the first arcade “Golden Era” of 1980-81 (your Centipedes, your Battlezones, your Galaxians, your Carnivals, your Defenders, your Moon Crestas etc) have enjoyed fairly respectable Speccy renditions by now, in some cases through a gradual evolution of improvement.

Donkey Kong, for example, started off pretty abysmally with Ocean’s infamous 1983 take (itself probably the best of a terrible bunch of early efforts which also included arguably not just the worst Speccy Kong but a very strong candidate for the accolade of the worst commercially-released videogame of all time).

But Ocean themselves had a much better stab at it a few years later, which was in turn recoloured by modders and then given a snazzy complete graphical overhaul, before being superseded late last year by a brilliant all-new version which continues to be tweaked and improved.

Pac-Man similarly came from ropey beginnings on the Speccy through a series of incremental steps until it now offers a whole selection of near-flawless options, from an actual emulated version running the real arcade ROMs (albeit with catastrophic colour clash) to two completely different near-perfect conversions with accurate ghost AI.

But Frogger started off rubbish and stayed rubbish. Even discounting the bucketloads – and buckets are where they belong – of magazine type-ins and the like returned by ZXDB, the commercial releases were almost all rank rotten, and even more modern remakes pretty dire, with the sole exception of a very likeable (but never fully finished) port written in a form of BASIC with single-character-block graphics but which still managed to resemble the coin-op far more closely than anything before it.

One could perhaps partially excuse 1982 releases like C-Tech’s spectacularly abysmal attempt on the basis that the Spectrum had only just come out and coders were having to learn how to,program it from scratch.

Ocean’s take, Road Frog, from a few months later, was barely much better and didn’t even let you move backwards, but it at least picked up the pace and got both the road and river onto the same screen.

Elfin Software’s borderline-unplayable Road Toad from the same year was a graphical tour de force by comparison.

(It was also remarkably reminiscent of the Frogger published by A’n’F, which had the advantage of sensible controls – QAOP rather than Road Toad’s idiotic ZXCV. Neither is credited to any named author in the ZXDB, and it looks very much like one is a slight rewrite of the other, cheekily sold to multiple companies.)

Hopper, from PSS, pulled off the difficult feat of being both less authentic and less enjoyable than the ZX81 version the same company had published previously, whose complete silence was also sonically preferable to the hideous noises emanating from the Speccy iteration.

Although a bit of kudos is due for adding a railway line blocking the central verge with parked or refersing steam trains as, we presume, some arch political commentary.

Let’s all, as a species, just try to pretend Terry’s Travels (released in the same year and at the same price as Lunar Jetman) didn’t happen.

But by 1984 the system had seen games like Sabre Wulf, Skool Daze, All Or Nothing, Lords Of Midnight, Tornado Low Level, Pyjamarama, Match Day, Full Throttle, 3D Starstrike, Combat Lynx, Psytron and Stop The Express, so the likes of Jogger from Severn Software were unambiguously unacceptable full-price fare.

Although frankly Jogger would have been pretty unacceptable if you’d spent an hour typing it in as a listing from Sinclair Programs, never mind handing over your hard-earned pocket money for it.

WoS includes this screenshot of Walltone’s ridiculous Frog Hopper, in which we’ve gotten one frog safely home to the top of the screen, solely to prove that it IS in fact possible. Not a single gameplay video on YouTube depicts anyone even getting a frog to the central verge on level 1. Give it a try yourself if you want to ruin your afternoon.

Yomp, from Virgin Games, which also includes a minefield-navigation section, was a Falklands War cash-in that was as playable and polished as it was tasteful.

(It was a game so infamously bad that its terribleness was used as the key plot point of Scorpion Software‘s sophisticated playground-piracy simulator The Rat.)

By the atrocious standards on show here, Frogger by Rabbit Software (again 1983, and running in 16K like most of the others) is actually kinda nice, with unique features like rows of parked cars, a little mini-maze section in the central reservation and the bizarre way you can die by crashing your frog into your spare lives at the bottom left corner, although the wildly over-sensitive control sucks most of the potential fun out.

(Even more bizarrely, if you lose a single life at any point, the game ends at the end of that stage, because you temporarily “lose” a life while it’s in a frog home and now you no longer have enough to fill all the slots and make the next stage.)

And if we tell you that Frog Run by Anirog is one of the slickest and most professional of the Frogger clones that came out during the life of the Spectrum, while noting that they couldn’t even be bothered to make the river blue, you’ll probably get a good idea of the picture we’re painting.

Really strangely, the Speccy didn’t even get a version of the officially-licenced Sega port for its American twin, the Timex TS2068, although that’s also no great loss. The 30 seconds it would have taken to make the tiny number of code tweaks required to make it run on the UK machine would have been a waste of effort that could have been more productively spent throwing trifles at panthers.

Even as late as 1990, in the machine’s dying days, people with absolutely no sense of human decency were still trying to get hard cash (albeit only £1.33) for the likes of Grebit.

And it’s a shameful indictment of the poor old rubber-keyed workhorse that the clear runner-up to Froggy as the best commercially-released Spectrum port of Frogger was CDS’s shoddy 1983 attempt Leapfrog, in which turtles vanish instantaneously from underneath your flippers without so much as a flicker of warning and the river graphics are just plain blobs of colour.

Even the crude original Parker Brothers conversion on the Atari VCS looked snappier, let alone the later and much prettier Starpath Supercharger cassette-tape release for the primitive console.

(Come to that, just about every videogaming platform on Earth, all the way down to the humble VIC-20, shamed the Spectrum for Frogger ports until this week.)

So as you enjoy Frogger RX on its own very considerable merits, take a moment to also appreciate just how startlingly far we’ve come in one massive bound. Truly, we are living in a better yesterday.