15. Freeway

Freeway
Atari 2600
1981

On the surface, Freeway in nothing more than a crappy two-player Frogger clone. And in fact, it IS a crappy two-player Frogger clone. Freeway is a race between two chickens trying to cross a road, and it plays just like competitive Frogger, without the river or the ability to move left or right. 

But here is the thing about Freeway: it is the little brother’s revenge game. You see, brothers play video games together, and big brothers always get to be Player One. That is the fundamental order of the universe. And Player One is a very enviable position. Player One gets to choose any game options, Player One usually gets first pick of selectable characters, and of course, Player One always gets to go first. 

I believe that Freeway was designed by a little brother, because Freeway is a fundamentally unbalanced game, totally putting the screws to Player One. You see, Player One is on the far left of the screen, while Player Two is on the far right. The way traffic flows in Freeway, this means that Player One will get blindsided by cars appearing from off-screen over and over again while Player Two nimbly scampers across the road. 

In his ode to this game, Perry Farrell sang "To fall in love this much, it's very dangerous. She makes me so jealous. I want to kill us both." Presumably, his girlfriend was second player, and was kicking Farrell's ass. By contrast, TV on the Radio sang, "They say it's darkest before the crack of light. You got to fuck somebody over before you get it right." I have no idea what that means.

Also, check out how close this game was:

I was Player One, with Troy, my erstwhile partner in Atari, taking the Player Two spot.  Troy thought his chicken was going to score him a narrow win, but Troy was wrong.  Some ties feel like wins.