Frogger was an arcade game developed in 1981 by Konami. The object of the game was to direct frogs to their homes one by one by crossing a busy road and navigating a river full of hazards. To start you had 3, 5, or 7 frogs. You would navigate your frog from the bottom of the screen to home base which was in one of 5 slots at the top of the screen. In order to get there, you had to both cross a busy street filled with cars, trucks, buses, dune buggies, bulldozers, vans, taxis, bicyclists and motorcycles, all speeding along it horizontally and a river with logs, alligators, and turtles, all moving horizontally across the screen. Every level had a minute time limit whereby you had to complete the trial or else, it was an automatic death.
Frogger is life, is it not? There you are at the start of your life, untouched by anything, filled with vitality. Then like most people, you are forced to enter into the rat race, or in the case of Frogger, a literal race against time filled with many hazards and obstacles to your success which you must over come or risk death or drowning under the weight of it all.
You start out confident that you can make it. You hop along right into the thick of things, but then it's not as easy as you thought it would be. Everything is moving along so fast, without care that you may need to slow down or take a different path in order to meet with your destiny. So you move a bit faster, find yourself in trouble, but quickly learn that the only one that can get you out, is you, using your own skill and cunning. No one else can help you, but you.
Sometimes you make it quite easily through life's task and you are extremely proud of yourself. You make it through the hazards that others struggle with, with ease. Then there are other times, when you can't figure it out, or the race doesn't quite seem like it's fair at all. Where the hell did that truck come from? Why did that alligator eat you when you know you could have made it if only you'd been given a fair chance. You may start to believe that everyone and everything is out to get you, to ruin you, to hurt you, to kill you. No one cares that you get run over. No one stops to check up on you or make sure you're okay. And then it's a new day, another trial, that just starts up again the next time, and everyone keeps it moving and you must again, start from the beginning and try to make it through.
It's a vicious cycle of major success and major failure. The minute you've got one strategy figured out in your life, the next, it doesn't work. Frogger is life. It let's you know that life is fleeting, it's hard, it doesn't stop for anyone or anything no matter how much you may will it to. You must keep it moving, and keep trying always, or risk death from stagnation. We may think we have the one chance in life, but sometimes life will give you a few more, but you must use them diplomatically and wisely in order to find yourself back on the right path, and just when you do get there, you do make it home, you do feel safe and warm and loved, tomorrow is a new day, a new challenge, something else that can go wrong, and always and forever a challenge.
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