Frogger -- who actually made it?

[SoulBlazer]

So I'm curious if anyone knows what the deal is with Frogger.

 

Sega released the game in the Arcades, and for that reason for many years I thought they had designed and made the game. But then when I first saw console ports of the game in the PlayStation era, it had Konami's name on it. Now I'm 99 percent sure that Konami has all the rights to it, since they have sequels and everything.

 

It seems like one one of the two situations happened:

 

1) Sega made the game and released it in the arcades, but for unknown reasons sold the full rights to Konami soon afterwards.

2) Konami contracted with Sega to make the game, and gave them rights for the arcade version while keeping all of the other rights.

 

But why this done? Sega was a well known arcade maker in the early 80's allready -- was this so Konami could have a more known company selling their game? But the two companies never did any other projects together or stuff like this, as far as I know.

[Tempest]

Konami was the creator, they just licensed it to Sega/Gremlin for some reason. Maybe they didn't think it had appeal outside of Japan? I believe the Japanese version has a Konami copyright still.

[UberArcade]

Back in the day a lot of arcade games were licensed to and manufactured by different companies than the ones that created the game. If Konami didn't have the ability to manufacture and distribute worldwide at that time it made sense to license it out to a company like Sega.

[Atariboy]

I suspect that UberArcade is 100% correct. It's the same reason that Mappy was distributed by Midway, Space Invaders by Midway, Pole Position by Atari, and a thousand other examples. Other than Nintendo, I'm unsure if any of these Japanese companies manufactured and distributed their own arcade machines in North America at the time. Instead the standard way was to create a distribution deal with an American firm that already had a presence here, warehouses, relationships with arcade distributors and operator's, etc.

 

Sega's deal though lasted a good length of time. Sega's listed as the copyright holder for everything from the earliest home ports up to at least the SuperNes/Genesis releases in the late 1990's. I imagine that's why Frogger was absent on Konami's Playstation collection because the Sega deal was still active.

[Torr]

I remember my old Sega Master System box having text saying "...have you heard of <game X>, or Frogger? Then you've heard of Sega and.." Like they were trying to use Frogger as a selling point on the Sega Master System. Only then did I look at my old 2600 cart of Frogger and realize, wow this WAS by Sega.

 

And apparently it wasn't BY Sega... but BY Konami, just licensed by Sega from what I've read here...