Freeway

aka: "Das Verruckte Huhn", Bloody Human Freeway
Moby ID: 9173
Atari 2600 Specs

Description official description

In Freeway, your job is to help the chicken cross the road! Each time you successfully guide the chicken across ten lanes of freeway traffic, you earn a point. Try to score as many points as you can by the end of the 2 minute 16 second time limit! In the two player game, whoever scores the most points by the end wins. Several game variations are included which can adjust the speed and amount of traffic on the freeway.

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Credits (Atari 2600 version)

Conceived and designed by

Reviews

Critics

Average score: 63% (based on 10 ratings)

Players

Average score: 3.1 out of 5 (based on 28 ratings with 1 reviews)

Why Did The Chicken Cross The Road? Why, Indeed....

The Good
It's a funny game, and strangely addicting, especially since "Activision Anthology" compilations allow players to save their high scores. The mantra of "one more game" becomes all too commonplace here. The graphic are bright and colorful. You can tell what the sprites are, and there's a decent variety of cars and trucks to avoid. The sound effects are minimal, but the car engines and horns are pretty accurate in sound, given the limitations of the system. The chicken sounds and ruffled feather animations do provide amusement.

The Bad
Clearly a "Frogger" knock-off, but without the variety of gameplay. The chicken can go up or down. That's it. And unlike "Frogger", it's only a highway that the chicken interacts with. No real changes in the terrain the chicken must face. Then again, I suppose it would have been called "Freeway & More" had they done that. It lives up to it's namesake, and the challenge remains.

The Bottom Line
One of the earliest Atari 2600 games, and based off one of the oldest jokes ever, "Freeway" had players guide a chicken from one side of the road to the other. Given it's early status, it remains more of a fond nostalgia than anything else, but the gameplay still remains solid. I think gamers who weren't raised on the title may wonder what the big deal is now, but for its time, this was as addicting as "Kaboom!" or any of their other early titles, and a classic in its own right. A little dated, but still has its fun.

Atari 2600 · by Guy Chapman (1748) · 2004

Trivia

Development

Before Freeway became a game about a chicken crossing the road, it was originally known as Bloody Human Freeway. While the gameplay was exactly the same, players controlled a human instead of a chicken. If the cars hit the person, he would explode into a little blood splatter instead of being bounced backwards. Bloody Human Freeway can be found in playable form on the Game Boy Advance version of Activision Anthology.

Prize

Players who were able to guide their chicken across the road 20 times or more on Game Three or Game Seven were eligible to receive the "Save the Chicken Foundation" patch from Activision if they sent in a screenshot to the company. Here is a picture of that patch at AtariAge.

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  • MobyGames ID: 9173
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Contributors to this Entry

Game added by Servo.

Windows, Xbox 360 added by Alaka.

Additional contributors: Guy Chapman, LepricahnsGold, Patrick Bregger, Siqo53.

Game added May 11, 2003. Last modified March 12, 2024.