Freeway

Freeway is an action game where the player guides a chicken across ten lanes of a freeway while avoiding traffic. It can be played in single player or two players simultaneously, with each person controlling a chicken. Each player can control their chicken moving up and down the screen. Each time the player moves their chicken across the freeway, they are awarded one point. Each game lasts two minutes and sixteen seconds and the player with the highest score is the winner.

If the difficulty switch is set to the A position on the system, the chicken returns to the curb when hit by a vehicle. If set to B, the chicken is only knocked back one lane. Using the selection switch, the player can change the game level based on freeways across the United States such as Lake Shore Drive in Chicago at 3:00 am, Long Island Expressway in New York City at 3:00 am and Bayshore Freeway in San Francisco at midnight. The eight gameplay modes vary the speed of the vehicles and the amount of traffic on the roads.

Freeway was developed by David Crane for Activision. Following disputes with the company Atari, Inc. over pay, several programmers including Crane left the company to form Activision. In their first year, the company released four games, including two developed by Crane: Dragster (1980) and Fishing Derby (1980).

Crane has given a few variations of a story that gave inspiration for Freeway. One variation published in 1981 involved Crane and his friends attempting to cross Chicago's busiest thoroughfare after exiting the wrong end of a building. When attempting to cross, one of his friends joked that this would make a great video game. Game designer Larry Kaplan would later be riding a bus and witnessed someone attempting to cross Lake Shore Drive.