By Reese McBride

Ever heard of Frogger? What about Dig Dug? Before going into room Mr. Schultz’s room on April 4, EagleView News hadn’t either. Eight students from Schultz’s class decided to bring these 1980’s arcade games back to life. They had the task of redesigning the games and making them a bit more modern. 

Frogger was developed in 1981 by the Konami company and was published for Sega. To beat the game, a player has to get a certain number of frogs on the other side of the screen. The frogs are usually controlled by a joystick, although in the version that seniors Micah Sanders-Johnson, Zachary Shore, Matteo Krivitzky, and Danny Betts made uses the WASD keys and spacebar keys on the average computer keyboard. 

The player is presented with challenges to their frog: cars in the road, moving logs on a river that also move the character, sharks that can jump out of the water and hit the frog off of the log,  and “birds that can knock you into cars” Shore said. 

The cars were the hardest part to recreate. “They were evil,” Sanders-Johnson said.

“The vehicles took forever to actually make work properly and have them not slow down while interacting with everything,” Betts said.

Most of these graphics were designed by all the team members who also added sound and music to their projects. “I’m not sure if we would have done anything differently but there are some things we could have improved on,” Shore said. “I think we had a plan so that made it easier to stay on task.”

In Dig Dug, the player gets a character that digs around each level while trying to avoid Pookas and Fygars, the enemies of the game. The Pookas act as bombs and try to blow up the character while the Fygars try to set the character on fire with their dragon breath. 

“We made everything,” senior James Liu said. When it comes to graphics, seniors Liu, Lincoln Warren, and Dixon Moore created everything from the dirt to the characters and enemies themselves. When the projects were presented, their other teammate, senior Drew Cozad, wasn’t available. “Drew worked specifically on movement,” Warren said. 

“If we had more time, I think we would have given Fygar his fire back,” Liu said. 

The characters for this version of the game are also controlled by the WASD keys that can be found on a computer.