Frogger: Ancient Shadow (partially found PC port of puzzle platformer; 2006)

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AncientShadowPC.png

The PC port's title screen.

Status: Partially Found

Frogger: Ancient Shadow is a 2005 puzzle platformer developed by Hudson Soft and published by Konami. The game was released September 27th, 2005 on the Playstation 2, Xbox, and Gamecube with a PC release coming out the following year. However, unlike prior franchise PC releases, the game was not released on a physical disc, but was instead sold as a USB game controller. When the controller was plugged in to a computer, the game would then be downloaded to the machine.

Lost PC Port

In August 2006, Konami released two versions of the Konami Live Online Game Controller, one being Frogger: Ancient Shadow and the other being the Konami Arcade Collection (which included re-releases of Time Pilot, Scramble, Ye Air Kung Fu, and Contra). The controller itself used the same technology produced by QiGo and Oberon Media that powered another similar product called NetJet.

With Frogger: Ancient Shadow, the controller would work as DRM and connect the user to the servers that were holding the game files.As you played the game, it would download the necessary files from the servers. The servers for the Konami controller were discontinued in July 2012, rendering both games inaccessible, resulting in the PC port for Frogger: Ancient Shadow being lost with Konami never re-releasing it in any manner unlike the titles from the Arcade Collection.

On August 16th, 2020, two Highway Frog Discord users named Kneesnap and Flairieve were able to pull some files and the game's executable from the latter’s old hard drive, revealing how the Konami Live Online Game Controller accessed the files necessary to run it. Their goal is to reconstruct the PC version by importing assets from other released versions of the game.

Gallery

Commercial for the controller + showcases brief gameplay footage.

More gameplay footage.

See Also

External Links

References