How to play Freeway online
- Move the left chicken (player 1): up and down arrow keys
- Move the right chicken (player 2): T (up) and G (down)
- Choose one of the eight games: F11 (the console’s Select switch)
- Start a game: F12 (the console’s Reset switch)
- Difficulty for each chicken: F4 (player 1) and F9 (player 2)
- Save and load: Ctrl + 0–9 saves to a slot, Alt + 0–9 loads it
The chickens only move forwards and backwards, never sideways, and the fire button does nothing in this game. One player can play alone; the other chicken simply stays on the curb.
Gameplay
The freeway has five lanes in each direction. Each time your chicken reaches the far side, you score a point and it starts again from the bottom. A game lasts two minutes and sixteen seconds. When the scores start flashing, eight seconds are left. Then the traffic stops, and the higher score wins. You never lose a life: a chicken that gets hit chirps, gets knocked back and tries again.
How far back you are knocked depends on the difficulty switch. In position B the chicken is pushed back one lane. In position A it goes all the way back to the curb. Each player has their own switch, so a stronger player can take the harder setting.
The eight freeways
Each game is named after a real American road at a particular time of day:
- Game 1: Lake Shore Drive, Chicago, 3 a.m. Light traffic, cars only, slowest near the curbs.
- Game 2: Interstate 5, Seattle, 6 a.m. Busier and faster, with trucks in one lane.
- Game 3: Santa Monica Freeway, Los Angeles, 10 a.m. Very fast trucks in both centre lanes.
- Game 4: Bayshore Freeway, San Francisco, midnight. Trucks in every lane.
- Games 5–8 (Detroit, Washington D.C., Dallas and New York) use the same amount of traffic as Games 1–4, but vehicles speed up and slow down at random.
Tips for more crossings
- Read the clusters. Vehicles in a lane travel in groups at the same speed and spacing. Once you know a lane’s rhythm, you can time your step into it.
- Look two lanes ahead. Stepping into a free lane is no use if the next one is about to fill. Watch the lanes on either side of your chicken, not just the one in front.
- Back off instead of getting hit. Pulling back one step costs less time than being knocked back, especially in position A.
The story behind Freeway
David Crane had left Atari to help found Activision in 1979. According to the usual account, the idea for Freeway came from seeing someone trying to dodge traffic across Lake Shore Drive in Chicago, which is why that road is Game 1. The first version had a person crossing the road. Days before it was due to be shown at the Consumer Electronics Show, Activision’s chief executive Jim Levy suggested a chicken instead, so the game could lean on the old “why did the chicken cross the road?” joke.
Freeway came out in July 1981, alongside Activision’s Kaboom!, and arrived around the same time as Konami’s arcade Frogger, to which it is often compared. Electronic Games magazine praised it for its originality, and it received an honourable mention for Most Innovative Game at the 1982 Arcade Awards. Players who crossed at least 20 times in Game 3 or Game 7 could send in a photo of their screen to join Activision’s “Save the Chicken Foundation” and receive a membership emblem.
