Freeway is an
Activision game that was created and released for the
Atari 2600 in 1981. It was programmed by David Crane, the developer of
Pitfall!. In the game, you and a second player control a chicken that you must get safely across a busy highway as many times as you can before the time runs out.
This game provides examples of
- Chicken Joke: Literally done as a video game, preceding the mobile game Crossy Road.
- Difficulty Levels: Eight. Games 1 to 4 have traffic of increasing levels of intensity but always moving at a constant speed. Games 5 to 8 have the cars randomly speeding up or slowing down.
- Everything Trying to Kill You: Or at least knock you down a few lanes.
- Expy: It's the home game version of Frogger, developed and released around the same time as the arcade original, before the latter game was even ported to the consoles.
- Family-Unfriendly Death: Averted, as the chicken is merely knocked down a few lanes (or to the bottom of the screen) when hit by a car.
- In the original prototype version called Bloody Human Freeway, your on-screen character would turn into a streak of blood when hit.
- In the reskin for the Sega version of Action 52, the dog gets smushed into bloody pieces.
- Made of Iron: The chicken merely gets knocked around instead of dying.
- Player Versus Player: All eight game variations can be played by either one or two players. If only one person plays, the other player's chicken doesn't do anything
- Real Life Writes the Plot: David Crane came up with the game during the SCES in Chicago, when he observed someone attempting to cross Lake Shore Drive on foot.
- Scoring Points: One point is scored for each successful crossing of the road.
- Timed Mission: Each game lasts two minutes and sixteen seconds.
