Pacific Coast Highway (video game)

Pacific Coast Highway
Developer(s)	Datasoft
Publisher(s)	Datasoft
Programmer(s)	Ron Rosen
Platform(s)	Atari 8-bit
Release	1982
Genre(s)	Action
Mode(s)	1-2 player simultaneous

Pacific Coast Highway (stylized as Pacific Coast Hwy) is a game written Ron Rosen for the Atari 8-bit family and published by Datasoft in 1982. It is a clone of Frogger, with the key gameplay differences being that Pacific Coast Highway allows two-player simultaneous play, and the highway and water segments are split into separate, alternating, screens. The game was not ported to any other systems.

Ron Rosen later wrote the 1984 platformer Mr. Robot and His Robot Factory

Each player starts at the bottom of the screen and the goal is to reach the top. Player one is a rabbit and player two, if present, is a tortoise. Both creatures play the same, and the tortoise and hare theme is not present elsewhere.

The first screen is the highway from the title, with eight lanes of traffic to avoid, divided in the center by a median strip (called a "rolling sidewalk" in the manual). The second screen is water-themed, and players must hop on the boats and rafts to reach the top. The median strip equivalent for the water is a row of connected life preservers. In later levels the median strip and life preservers move, first in one direction only, then randomly switching. Getting hit by a vehicle results in an ambulance taking the character away (or a rescue boat for the water sequence).

The manual describes the second screen as crossing a beach of hot sand by jumping on towels and surfboards, but this isn't present in the game itself.

Compute! editorial assistant Charles Brannon wrote, "A frustrating aspect of the game is that if one player gets hit (or takes a plunge), both players have to start over."

Preppie! - another Atari 8-bit Frogger clone from 1982

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