Froggo

~ the last words ~

Froggo sold Atari 2600 cartridges out of 479 Macara Avenue in Sunnyvale, California, from a suite in building 802. The California corporate register carries the company as FROGGO GAMES CORPORATION, not as the "Froggo, Inc." that the encyclopedia gives it, and the company's own full-page advertising agrees with the register.

The register holds two filings and nothing else. On 14 October 1987 the entity filed a Certificate of Amendment recorded as a name change, so Froggo was not incorporated under that name at all. Something older became Froggo that autumn. The predecessor name is blank in every free copy of the record, and the filing itself, number A0340533, sits behind a California business-search service that refuses automated requests, so what the company used to be called is still an open question.

The second filing is dated 1 March 1991 and is a Franchise Tax Board suspension. In California that follows a failure to file returns or pay the minimum franchise tax, and it is what the state does to a corporation that has stopped answering. There is no dissolution on the record, and no successor. Thirty-five years later the entity is still sitting there in suspended status, and that suspension is the last entry in the file.

Wikipedia dates the end to 1989, and that date is both uncited and wrong. The sentence carrying it has had a citation-needed tag on it since November 2019, and the reasoning behind the year is that Froggo advertised four unreleased Atari 7800 games in the May/June 1989 issue of Atarian and then went quiet. In fact the identical advertisement ran again in the July/August issue and again in the October one. Atarian folded after three issues. Froggo was still buying full pages in the last of them.

~ the record ~

~ panda's back catalog ~

The business was not making games. Panda, Inc. had published Sea Hawk, Exocet and Scuba Diver back in 1983; Froggo took the three of them over and put them back on shelves four years later, with Exocet renamed Cruise Missile and Scuba Diver renamed Sea Hunt. Task Force came from Spectravision, where it had been Gangster Alley in 1982, and Karate came from Ultravision. Spiderdroid was described by one contemporary profile as Parker Brothers' Amidar with the sprites swapped out.

Prices from the company's own ad: $16.95 for the three recovered Panda titles, $14.95 for the other three on the 2600. The two Atari 7800 games, Tank Command and Water Ski, were $29.95 each. That is the whole catalog, and only the 7800 pair looks like original work.

The reception was what you would expect of a 1983 catalog sold in 1989. Digital Press ran a survey of the worst Atari 2600 games in 1991 and landed three Froggo titles inside the bottom ten, taking positions four, five and six in a row. The write-up's line about the company has aged into something almost affectionate: "The good people at Froggo have once again brought us a timeless classic from the archives of Panda games."

~ the four that never shipped ~

The advertisement that ran unchanged through all three issues of Atarian listed four Atari 7800 games under "Coming Attractions", all at $29.95: Pyromania, Scorpion Squad, UFO and Night of the Ninja. None of them was ever released. The common retelling says the company went under straight after announcing them, but the announcement kept running into that October, so whatever happened to Froggo happened somewhere in the seventeen months between then and the tax suspension.

Today froggo.com is a German-held domain registered in 2008, pointing at an address that answers on neither port 80 nor 443. froggogames.com has never been a website in its life, and currently sits on a domain marketplace with a price on it. For a company that spent its whole existence selling other people's games back to people who had already bought them, there is something fitting about ending as inventory.

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