Posted on May 21, 2023
Pacific Coast Highway for Atari 8-Bit Computers
Pacific Coast Highway is a 1982 video game written by Ron Rosen and published by Datasoft for the Atari family of 8-bit computers. The game is a Frogger clone, but it differs a bit, due to the road and water portions of the game being separated into two different screens.
In the game, the player controls a rabbit (in two-player games, the second player controls a tortoise.) The object of the game is to get your character from the bottom of the screen, up to the top of the screen.
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. The difference between the two is entirely visual, 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).[5] 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).
To download Pacific Coast Highway and its manual, visit the Atarimania website.