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Games

80s Arcade Game Frogger Modded To Use Real Cars

This retro classic uses real-time traffic from NYC’s 5th Avenue.

Get out your retro-tinted glasses and take a look back to the past, where things were generally more pixellated and tweeting was strictly for the birds. Back then arcades were how most people got their virtual fix and one arcade game worth wasting your youth on was Konami’s Frogger—a game where you helped frogs cross a busy road while avoiding all the cars and obstacles in-between. You may also remember the Commodore VIC-20 version, which was a nigh-on perfect conversion from console to 8-bit home computer. It looked and sounded like the below.

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Skip forward a few decades and apart from playing for retro kicks, no one but a time traveller from the 80s thinks Frogger is a cutting edge example of gaming in the 21st century. But what if you swapped those 8-bit graphics for real traffic driving down New York City’s 5th Avenue? This is exactly what Tyler Deangelo has done with 5th Ave Frogger, a modded arcade cabinet that uses actual real-time traffic as the obstructions you have to dodge. He set up a webcam and wrote some code that translates the real-time moving traffic into live streaming data mapped onto the game’s graphics.

Check out the video above showing how he did it, as told by a talking frog.

[via Waxy]

@stewart23rd