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47 Ways I Died
(Playing Frogger)
1.
“C’mon, Mike, this game is ancient,” said Lucas. “And it’s crap. And you always lose instantly.”
“I like it,” said Mike, taking a quarter from the pile in his hand. “And Will likes it, too.”
Lucas raised an eyebrow behind Mike’s back.
“Uh… Yeah,” said Will. “I think it’s cool.”
“See. Will likes it.” Mike shoved his coin into the slot. “Now, watch this.”
Lucas watched. “You did mean to jump towards that tractor, right?”
“Shut up.”
Will patted him on the shoulder.
2.
Hemmed in by a truck moving more slowly than he expected, and stuck behind by a faster pink car, Mike could do nothing but watch as the racing car flattened his frog.
Ouch.
The screen went black, then invited him to insert 25¢.
Mike sighed and looked around for his friends. They were crowded round Pac-Man, of all things. Part of Dustin’s mission to educate El. He guessed he ought to go support his girlfriend. Plus, he’d run out of quarters.
3.
Mike thought it was deliberately misleading. There they were, four inviting green platforms. This was surely what you did – you got the frog all the way from the weird purple bit at the bottom to the nice normal green but at the top. Good game, well done.
But no.
No, you were actually aiming, against all previous requirements, for the water in between those more logical end points. Who knew?
According to Lucas, absolutely everybody, but Lucas could shove it.
So that was Mike’s third death, and his first Game Over.
4.
He would claim that the joystick had been out of alignment, and that when he’d jumped backwards into a pink car, he’d meant to jump left. Which would’ve been, uh, into a racing car again.
5.
Mike remembered when it was new – always a bit behind the times, Hawkins didn’t get it until mid-1983, not all that long before everything happened.
He remembered his first death.
Ran into the back of a pink car. He had been running away from the one behind it and not really anticipated that you could outrun the one in front. He wasn’t really sure how that would work, in, like, physics terms. Surely you couldn’t get run over by a wheel that was rolling away from you?
But, anyway, the game was the game, and it had its own rules, and he had two more lives anyway.
One more life, anyway.
6.
Mike swiped at the joystick in frustration, letting it wobble back and forth as he stalked off through the lines of games. He chewed his lip, seething.
He had jumped at the right time. There was no way he could have missed the log. But, by like a pixel, or whatever, the game had decided that he had. 99.9% aligned, and still punished for it. Total bullshit.
7.
In a fit of irritation, Mike slammed the joystick forwards. By some miracle, that led the frog flying across a perfect path to its destination.
Huh. With the next frog he repositioned and tried the same thing –
Squished by a yellow car instantly.
8.
He didn’t even know how he died one time in the high heat of August when Lucas had stomped in, pulled a pair of Mike’s swimming shorts over his head, and marched him, protesting valiantly, but in a muffled kind of way, out of the door and into Dustin’s car.
9.
Jumping off the end of a log hadn’t been his finest moment, especially not when the others were watching. He was starting to think that watching him lose was becoming more entertaining to them than just about any other game in the arcade.
10.
Mike was quite proud of the amount of hopping around to cheat death that he’d been doing. Up and down, side to side, timing things just right to avoid the edge or diving turtles, and he was safe now, sat on a log and waiting to drift past an empty slot. Just a couple seconds more, and –
Time Over
What! That was a thing?
Mike scowled at the screen as his new life started. Yeah, he supposed the big green bar with TIME next to it, clipping down second by second, was a hint he should have taken, but he’d thought that was just a bonus multiplier.
11.
It took Mike three visits to the arcade to make it to Level 2. He hadn’t really been aware that there would be a Level 2. You got the five frogs on the five lily pads, and that was it. Maybe pretty short if you were good enough, but it was hard enough as it was.
But no. With one life left, he hopped his frog onto the middle lily pad, and all the frogs disappeared.
Level Up
Cool.
Everything was faster now. The time was still ticking down at its usual rate, but all the vehicles and everything were going more quickly. And there was a crocodile?
He felt like he was getting pretty good at how the game worked, though, so was pretty pleased that he managed to get his frog across the road without getting squished by the faster cars on his first try. He smirked. Mike 1 – Frogger 0.
He hopped from the safety of the riverbank across the slightly faster moving river objects, then onto the last log –
Which wasn’t a log. Before he could react, it opened its mouth and he died.
Mike stared at the screen for a moment, his open mouth reflected back at him in the glass. How many ways did this game want to kill you with?
12.
‘HOW is it POSSIBLE that a FROG can’t SWIM?’
Dustin had never liked Frogger.
13.
Panicking about an approaching lorry, Mike had jumped onto the tail of a snake. Of course, that was a death. Was there anything you could do in this game that didn’t kill you? Truly, the Australia of the arcade.
14.
Mike saw a gap in the traffic and went for it, jabbing the joystick forward as fast as he could – one, two, three, four, five, whoops, six – and jumped straight into the water. Great.
15.
By far Mike’s most common cause of death was waiting too long on the longer middle log, persistently underestimating how long it took for the next set of turtles to appear and then either drifting off the edge of the screen or jerking the joystick forward at the last possible moment, making a panicked hopeful jump up in an attempt to anticipate the coming turtle.
The game did not reward anticipation, but again and again Mike tried his luck. And every time he drowned.
16.
“Wouldn’t it be easier if you filled the lily pads from left to right?” asked Will. “Because that way you’d get the hardest one out of the way first, and you could relax a bit.”
“Uh, yeah, I know,” said Mike, who had not worked that out and filled them in a random order depending on how desperate he was for at least some success before it was Game Over.
But this time (fresh quarter) Mike did as Will said (whipped, Lucas would have said, even back then) and after a bit of frantic hopping, leapt clean off the left-hand end of the log and into the water.
Fuuuuuck.
17.
Yellow car. Yellow car! That was just humiliating. One hop and dead.
18.
By the third week of playing, Mike routinely got to the second level without losing more than one life, and that one usually by accident or when he got distracted by Will standing in his line of vision, or Will standing close enough at the next cabinet that he could just about smell his detergent, or the sound of Will’s voice across the arcade. Or his girlfriend El standing over his shoulder, he supposed.
“I’ve been struggling with hands, you know?” Will was saying to Lucas, both of them watching Max rack up another impossibly high Dig Dug score. “They’re hard to get right. But I’ve been practising.”
Mike was wondering whether he should offer to let Will draw his hands, when a blare from the cabinet informed him that the crocodile he’d been sitting on the back of swam off the edge of the screen.
19.
Mike really thought he was going to do it this time. There had been some close moments, one stupid death, but he was close now. He reckoned he had it down.
Or he would have done if he hadn’t run into the side of a lorry,
20.
Weirdly, Level 2 seemed to put up less of a fight. Maybe he just knew what he doing – or, well, what not to do – a bit better, but he could see the gaps better, anticipate the shifts, balance between waiting an acting – yeah, he was getting better at this.
Still not amazing, though, as the unexpected appearance of a snake along the riverbank showed. So, he no longer got a breather after making it across the traffic. Seemed pretty mean.
21.
Mike was ready to jump onto the last lily pad when a crocodile head poked out. “Shit.”
His log almost off the edge of the screen, he jumped back onto the first set of turtles, ready to jump back as soon as they lined up with the next log –
The turtles sank, taking his frog with it.
22.
Levelling up was easier now. He was even showing his friends.
“I thought the point was not to get run over?” said Lucas.
“Ha ha.”
“Genuinely curious.”
23.
Lorry.
24.
Snake.
25.
Snake on a log.
26.
Snake on a different log.
27.
Some kind of beaver thing? He was on the end of a log and it came along, and he just died? What the hell?
28.
Somehow hopped off the end of the screen. Like, how?
29.
El had thought that the frog was cute.
She was pretty good – as she was with most games that required quick reflexes – though Frogger was unforgiving of her tendency to pre-empt things. Even a millisecond too early and the log wouldn’t catch you.
But her real problem was her refusal to complete a level without ‘saving the extra frog’. She was convinced that it had to appear on every new frog. Mike didn’t think that was true, and, standing behind her left shoulder, had told her that in increasingly frustrated terms, itching from foot to foot, but she insisted on hopping up and down the bank, on and off the logs and turtles, until the bonus frog came onto the screen.
Or until she timed out.
Mike was getting used to putting one of his dwindling supply of quarters into her hand.
30.
Unlike many of the other games in the arcade, Mike played this one because he wasn’t good at it. It wasn’t like Max with Dig Dug or Lucas with Zaxxon, or even his own mastery of, of all things, Pengo. He’d never dominated the Frogger scoreboard – hardly ever even placed. The people who did would probably find his endless deaths amusing.
It frustrated him terribly, and that’s why he kept coming back.
Even if he died in a way which was totally unfair, like when you jumped onto a lily pad just as a crocodile stuck its head out.
31.
“It gets easier after Level 5,” said Mike.
“You ever get to Level 5 yet?” asked Max.
Mike much preferred Will watching him.
Level 4 was impossible. All the cars just went way too fast. Mike’s eyes could barely keep up. It only took a momentary lapse in concentration for everything to become a blur. Sometimes he wondered if he needed glasses. He also wondered if the eyepatch was a problem, but on voicing this as an excuse, Max had snorted, pointed out that he’d been just as bad before, and went back to sarcastically calling out obstacles.
32.
“And if a ten-tonne truck, killed your little frog...” crooned Will.
“Shut up.”
“… what a heavenly way to die.”
“I will stop kissing you.”
“I’d like to see you try.”
33.
Once, quite early on in his endless campaign, he had almost made it to Level 4, having carefully husbanded his lives up to that point, before promptly jumping three times into the bushes instead of the lily pads.
Huddling behind it, years later, waiting for a pack of demodogs to snuffle on by, he would notice that the dent was still there in the base.
34.
Of the six or so times he timed out, he didn’t much mind the last one, pressed up against the farthest corner where the machine had been moved, with newer, bigger, brighter things having laid claim to the more central regions of the arcade; a corner visited only by those who were nostalgic, if not for the games themselves, then for when they only cost a quarter to play, or those who had worked their way through the newer games and wondered if the old games would be better or at least different, before tiring of the uneven gameplay and fairly limited variation, leaving it, ultimately, only to those who remembered where it was, and Mike, his affectionate persistence in playing the dumb frog game on this occasion undermined by Will’s mouth working steadily, efficiently, delightfully, on top of his own.
Yeah, he really hadn’t minded that one.
35.
Mike liked the way the gameplay never really changed. The obstacles got more challenging to deal with, but you always dealt with them in same way – just patience, timing, a bit of luck. Balancing between caution and speed. A death on the first level was the same as a death on the fourth level.
Amply demonstrated by him getting run over by a hyperfast tractor.
36.
“At this stage I don’t even want to think how much money that machine has taken from you.”
“Mmm.” It had taken a bit of a refresh, but Mike made his way quite easily to Level 4 these days.
“Think of all the dates you could have taken me on, Mike!” Will sighed and leaned against a rip-off of … something. He wasn’t sure of the original anymore. He licked at his lollipop. “If I were a material girl, I’d be pretty resentful by now.”
“Good job you aren’t, then,” said Mike, almost incomprehensible with his tongue poking out as he concentrated.
“I could be! I could want things!” Will sighed. “Things could be part of my life. They’ve just never had the chance, what with the grinding poverty and so on. Maybe I’d like it, if only my boyfriend weren’t showering all his money on a digital frog instead of me.”
“I’ll buy you another lollipop if you shut up.”
“I don’t know… Is that all I’m worth?”
Having gone up another level, Mike took advantage of the reset to look sidelong at Will. “Don’t pretend Hopper doesn’t spoil you rotten. Sometimes I think he prefers you to El.”
“I am his little angel. It’s because I don’t date ‘unsuitable boys’.”
“Little does he know…” muttered Mike, eyes back fixed on Level 3 until Will shoved a hand into Mike’s back pocket and squeezed.
37.
Mike was on the last log, drifting down the far bank, and he was confused. Every space was occupied. He was sure he’d only got four frogs across – indeed, the game was sure, since he hadn’t levelled up – but he couldn’t for the life of him see the free gap.
No crocodiles blocking anywhere. Just frog, frog, frog, frog, frog.
Frog, frog, frog, frog, frog.
Frog, frog, fly, frog, frog.
Wait. Frog, frog, fly?
Crap.
Too late. Off the end of the screen.
Double crap.
38.
“Will it even work?”
Mike shrugged. “Only one way to find out...”
The machine stood, not in its usual place, but tilted against a pile of rubble. Unlike a lot of the others, though, the screen was intact, and the plug was still there.
Mike tugged the cord out of the mess and into the portable generator that was powering the power tools they were using as part of the cleanup operation. What home gaming consoles had threatened, Vecna had delivered, and the arcade was a semi-roofless wreck. But they and the other volunteer teams were working their way through Hawkins. With government support, triggered by an apparently unending reservoir of government guilt, the town was going to be rebuilt, just as it was.
Well, without all the evil.
Mike wasn’t sure why they were rebuilding everything at such speed – Hop, though, had said that the government would only keep its interest for so long, and that if its hand was in its pocket now, then they should empty it before it could remember how to say no.
Anyway, Mike nodded to Will, who flicked the switch. The familiar electronic music started playing.
“Oh, God…” groaned Dustin from the next room. “Why was that of all things not destroyed?”
“Anyone got a quarter?” asked Mike.
“Anyone mind if I hit Mike with a shovel?” asked Dustin.
“OK, OK…” said Mike, yanking out the plug. He patted the cabinet. “I’ll be back, baby.”
39.
Now that it was in its secluded corner, Will was a proper menace. Mike wasn’t even sure he’d played a game in weeks. Months.
Somehow he always knew when Mike was there (though after a shift at Family Video was usually a good bet) and he’d come in straight from the diner, make a beeline for him, then take advantage of the poor sightlines to dip out of everyone’s field of vision, and then to start working on Mike. The smell of grease and spilt coffee from Will’s uniform and in his hair was now so linked with these sessions that Mike sometimes had to count backwards from twenty before opening the door to the kitchen on those rare Sundays when his mom did bacon for breakfast.
Will, it turned out, had a bit of a thing for recklessly public PDA and beyond. If he had a game of choice these days, it was playing chicken with their outing. He had really taken Mike’s “I don’t care if they find out” to heart, seemingly bent on getting them found out in the most lurid way possible. Only last week he’d pressed Mike against the basement wall right next to the outside door kissing him pink all the while Dustin was rattling the handle only a few inches of drywall away. And then, when Mike was just about at the limit of his self-control, Will ripped away, unlocked the door and flung it open wide. Fortunately, Dustin had been too preoccupied with launching into a description of his latest invention – a way of checking how much charge a battery had – to register Mike’s wrecked appearance as he peeled himself, breathless, off the wall.
But Will was graduating way past kissing at this point. If anyone ever did catch them, getting thrown out of the arcade would be the least of their problems. They’d be fucking arrested, and not, Mike conceded, without due legal cause.
40.
It did get easier after Level 5.
Mike had been in the arcade on his own, killing some time before the six of them were due to go to the movies, and everything had been going surprisingly smoothly, and, when he got to Level 5, how he hadn’t noticed before that there was a slightly larger gap between two of the tractors in each sequence, that meant that you could get through – if not easily, then at least slightly less panicked.
And then, noticing that, it just worked. Like magic. And there it was. New music, new life, which was absurdly generous. Slower cars, with bigger gaps between them. Objectively, it was probably harder than Level 1 or maybe even Level 2, but, still, easier. Enough that he beat Level 6 on his first go.
Then, on Level 7, he got killed by the unexpected appearance of a second snake on the riverbank coming from the other direction. This death didn’t dampen his mood, though, and he was still beaming when he got to the movie theatre.
“I did it – I got past Level 5!”
“Of Frogger?” asked El.
“Of course of Frogger,” said Dustin. “Like he ever plays anything else these days. But, Michael Wheeler, friends don’t lie.”
“I’m not lying! I genuinely did! You get another life!”
41.
It was genuinely quite frustrating watching Will play. This wasn’t his sort of thing at all. He was the Party’s main Asteroids player.
Mike was behind him, hands resting on Will’s shoulders in a way that would be plausibly deniable if anyone came by.
Will just – he had the strategy right, sure, and he could see what he needed to do, but he dithered, and he panicked, and he didn’t really get the timings. Mike tried to remind himself that he’d played this game hundreds of times in what Lucas called a ‘worryingly obsessive manner’ and what Max called ‘one of many reasons Mike shouldn’t be allowed to interact with the general public’, so Will couldn’t be blamed too much for this.
Plus, it was cute the way he was quite obviously trying, and in doing so, trying to impress Mike. Will was really concentrating, giving it his full attention in the way he usually only gave his art, or an ice cream sundae, or Mike.
As Will died again on a level Mike now usually did without thinking, he turned his head so that Mike could see his overbitten little pout, and murmured “Show me.”
Mike put his arms, rather less plausibly deniably, around Will’s sides, pressing softly into him, and putting his hand on top of Will’s on the joystick. As the new life came up, Mike guided his hand, moving faster and faster, racking up frogs successfully crossed. Now Mike liked that he was impressing Will, though there was a thought in his head that maybe Will had planned this all along.
As the game got harder, though, Mike struggled to keep up. Will was rather wider than him these days, and having to bend even his long arms awkwardly around him wasn’t the best long-term, and eventually, slightly stiff, his hand moved slightly too slowly and he didn’t jump off a sinking turtle in time.
Will sighed, then leaned back to kiss him on the side of the neck. “You’ll have to give me more lessons.”
42.
Eventually, Mike was able to prove to his friends that he could make it to Level 6. They were duly impressed, though Dustin noted that it would have been more impressive if it hadn’t taken him about five years to do so.
Mike had noted that he’d been busy saving the world.
Max had noted that that hadn’t stopped her continuing high scores.
Mike had got distracted by the opportunity to bicker, and never even noticed that he hadn’t made it to Level 7
43.
“Miiiiiiiiiike.”
“Just a second –”
“I’ll blow you if you lose in the next ten seconds.”
River. Yellow Car. Yellow Car.
GAME OVER
44.
Mike, well used now to getting the at least Level 6, was getting a little cocky. So much so that, even two days before his final ever game in Hawkins, he got run over by the racing car. Three times in a row. On Level 1.
Mike was glad nobody saw that one. Just a practice quarter.
45.
“Why do you love this game so much?”
Mike shrugged. “It’s soothing.”
“But you die so often,” said El.
Mike shrugged. “So it doesn’t bother me that much.”
“What do the beavers do, again?”
“Kill you…” sighed Mike, as he strayed too close to the left edge of his log.
“Like that?”
“Just like that.”
“Are you sure you love this game. You’re gripping the cabinet very strongly.” She peered at his hands and his whitening fingers. “Does that not hurt?”
46.
Mike had always refused to get the home gaming version. Frogger was for the arcade, and nowhere else. He felt it was an act of loyalty, even as he bought or wheedled versions, knock-off or otherwise, of most of his other favourite cabinets.
There was just nothing like the opportunity to jump into a crocodile’s open mouth in public.
47.
“Come on, Mike, this is ridiculous. We have to go or it’ll be dark way before we get anywhere near Chicago.”
“This won’t take long. Much longer.”
“You are so lucky I’m in love with you.”
“I am well aware.”
“And yet you continue to push it.” Will tapped his foot. “I assure you, they will have this game in Chicago. There will be arcades. You don’t have to go cold turkey. Mike? Mike? You listening to me? Sometime I think you love that frog more than me.”
“It doesn’t talk back…” said Mike, sweat beading on his forehead and soaking into the top of his eyepatch. Then a lorry hit him yet again and the death sound played.
But… He grinned. He’d memorised the number he’d need to get long ago
5TH FFC 33870 PTS
Will rolled his eyes. “FFC?”
“Frog Face.”
Will punched Mike on the shoulder. “Yeah, OK. Can we go now?”
Mike slipped his arm around his boyfriend, glancing back at the cabinet. “Sure. Let’s get out of here.”