17. Frogs and Flies

Frogs and Flies
Atari 2600
1982



There isn’t much to Frogs and Flies. In this two-player game, you press up on the joystick to jump from one side of the screen to the other in a static, pre-determined path. If your frog’s mouth passes by a fly during this jump, you eat it. Who ever eats the most flies wins.  That's it.   This game is so simple, it makes Hungry Hungry Hippos look like Go. Despite being so laughably simplistic, there is a degree of skill involved in nabbing flies, which keeps the game playable, at the least.

The weird thing about this game is that if you toggle the difficulty from “easy” to “hard”, you find yourself able to move your frog back and forth, and control the height of your jumps. Paradoxically, this does indeed make the game much, much more difficult. In this free-will mode, the game stops being an oversimple game of timing and turns into a frustrating exercise of not making your frog go where you want it to.

One may be tempted to dismiss these quirky controls as nothing more than shoddy programming, but I choose to interpret a deeper meaning. I hold that Frogs and Flies is a subtle argument for social conformity. Frogs who stay on their preordained path catch lots of flies. Frogs who insist on charting their own course, fall off of their lily pads leaving thier flies to the competition.