Frogger
This is the nightmare of modern office life: work that crushes the spirit, office cubicles as cells, and managers as wardens. The office is a dehumanizing environment for the employees – the kind of thing that makes you a cog in the machine – a number. Nothing.
Faced with that, driven to a breaking point, human beings generally do one of two things: create their own petty fiefdoms and delusions of importance… or Get Out.
Frogger is about Getting Out. You remember the artwork on the side of the old Frogger arcade console? (Here’s a hint: look at the picture on the front cover of this game.) A frog, rushing somewhere, vest and tie awry, briefcase in hand. It’s easy to think that he’s imitating the White Rabbit, muttering “I’m late, I’m late…”, except that you know from the game itself that he’s trying to get Home. He’s an office worker, trying to get away, get across all these obstacles, and get to the thing he wants – the thing he needs.
Something happened to our worker bee that made him want to get away from the buzz; something hit that cog and made it slip off.
This game was written as part of the 1KM1KT 24-Hour RPG challenge, which called for designers to adapt a computer game into a tabletop RPG in 24 Hours. Any computer game would have been fine; I could have done City of Heroes… I could have done X-Com (heck, I actually planned to do that one), but my girlfriend suggested Frogger as a joke, and the damn idea wouldn’t get out of my head.
Aside from the game itself, I’ve pulled a lot of inspiration from movies like Office Space, Clockwatchers, Falling Down, Lost in Translation, Harold and Kumar go to White Castle, and (to take it a bit further afield) Shawn of the Dead, Grosse Pointe Blank, and Road to Perdition.
And this is what I ended up with. Enjoy.
- Frogger.pdf
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Tags: Doyce Testerman
