How to play Bloody Human Freeway online
- Walk forward and back: up and down arrow keys
- Player 2: T (up) and G (down)
- Start a game: F12 (the console’s Reset switch)
- Choose a game: F11 (the console’s Select switch)
- Save and load your progress: Ctrl+0–9 saves a state, Alt+0–9 loads it
Gameplay
The game plays just like the finished Freeway. A busy highway with five lanes in each direction fills the screen, and you try to get your walker from the bottom kerb to the top as many times as you can before time runs out. Each safe crossing scores a point.
The big difference is the hero: a small running man instead of a chicken. According to MobyGames, when a car hits him he bursts into a little splash of blood rather than being knocked back, which explains the prototype’s grim name.
Why Bloody Human Freeway was never released
David Crane said the idea came to him in Chicago during the Consumer Electronics Show, when he saw a man dodging rush-hour traffic on Lake Shore Drive. His first version had two men racing each other across the road. Some people at Activision were uneasy about a game where people get run over. Just days before the next show, Activision’s chief executive Jim Levy suggested a chicken instead: it suited the old “why did the chicken cross the road?” joke, and someone in a chicken suit could promote it at the show. Freeway came out in 1981 with the chicken, and the human version was shelved.
The prototype became public in January 2005, when Thomas Jentzsch and Matt Reichert of AtariProtos released it on AtariAge together with Activision’s unreleased Venetian Blinds demo, with Activision’s help. It was also included on the Game Boy Advance version of Activision Anthology.
