Crosswalk: five lanes to the sand
A Frogger for the El Segundo strand. Sidewalk, five lanes of cars, a bus, skateboards and bikes, the median, the bike path, the sand, and four lifeguard towers to reach before the clock runs out. Atari 800XL or Commodore 64 blue, synthesized sound, and a street that answers your mood.
Crosswalk is Frogger the way a home computer in 1983 would have shown it, set on the street between El Segundo and the sand. A beach-goer starts on the sidewalk and hops up through five lanes of traffic: cars both ways, a bus, a lane of skateboards. The median has three palms to rest under. Then the bike path, two lanes of riders, then the sand, then the water, where four lifeguard towers are the homes. Thirty seconds a crossing to start. Fill all four towers and the next stage runs faster, shorter on the clock, and every lane reversed. The game keeps a mood with you, the same model Breakwater keeps. Every safe hop forward and every lane cleared raise its energy; a hit, a splash or a timeout lowers its calm; time brings it back. DAWN is warming up. FLOW is a long run of safe hops with the music opened up. RUSH is hot colors, raster bars in the border, faster lanes, tighter gaps, and a beach ball on the sand worth two hundred at a tower. DRIFT is what happens after hits: the traffic thins, the gaps widen, the clock gives you longer, the notes thin out. You set a dial, CALM, PLAY or RUSH, and the game relaxes toward it. In CALM there are no lives; a hit just walks you back to the sidewalk. Two tributes to pick from, the same two as Breakwater: the Atari 800XL blue with a black border and POKEY-spirit squares, or the Commodore 64 blue inside a light-blue border with a SID-spirit filter sweep. Every sprite is eight by eight rects in the machine palette. Nothing is emulated and nothing is copied. A hop blip rises with every row, a horn sounds on a hit, four notes play at a tower. It is built for a phone held upright, swipe or tap to hop, and for a desktop in full screen. The mood tape from your session stays in your browser, and when you leave after a game, the game hands its mood to the town. [Play Crosswalk](/crosswalk). [Read the machine edition](/crosswalk.json). [Breakwater, the first cabinet in this row](/breakwater). [The research note on Frogger and its home ports](https://github.com/mhoydich/pointcast/blob/main/docs/notes/2026-10-22-crosswalk-notes.md).
