A Real-Life Contest Challenged Gamers to Beat George Costanza’s ‘Frogger’ Score

Despite the fact that Jerry’s bookcase was stocked with Nintendo cartridges (as well as bootleg pornography), the Seinfeld gang rarely seemed very interested in video games. But that all changed in the ninth and final season of the show. 

“The Frogger” found George going to extreme lengths to preserve his high score on an old Frogger arcade cabinet, eventually playing a wildly dangerous real-life version of the game as he tries to move the machine across the street. 

According to director Andy Ackerman, recreating the game on the Seinfeld set proved to be a big “challenge,” requiring 30 stunt drivers, and forcing Jason Alexander to dive out of the way of a speeding truck. “It was almost an all-day event to put together a one-minute sequence,” Ackerman admitted.

But the hard work was clearly worth it. Not only did we get another classic Seinfeld episode, but this storyline had a big impact on people — and not just because Peacock essentially turned it into a game show in 2021.

In 2005, Twin Galaxies, the “authoritative body” for “verifying achievements” in video games, presented a contest of sorts — no, not that kind of contest — offering a cash prize of $1,000 to anyone who could “beat George’s Frogger high score” of 863,050 points (although it was actually just 860,630 points).

While the offer was valid between January 1, 2005 and December 31, 2005, nobody ended up beating the record held by GLC (George Lewis Costanza). But in 2009, George’s self-described “legacy” was toppled by Pat Laffaye of Westport, Connecticut, who scored a whopping 896,980 points, setting a “new world record” for Frogger. 

Despite the fact that this number was seemingly decided upon at random by the same group of creatives who came up with the puffy shirt and “Mulva,” Twin Galaxies heralded the news as a major achievement. “Even though it was imagined by television writers, Pat has broken one of the most famous scores in pop culture,” the organization said in a statement. “Pat’s amazing score will now forever be attached to not only Twin Galaxies history, but pop-culture trivia as well.”

Reportedly, both Laffaye and another player later obtained Frogger scores of over a million, which is a lot of effort to put into a janky simulation of urban animal endangerment.

But as Kotaku noted at the time, Frogger’s score can’t actually go up to a million, because the score rolls back to zero “whenever a player surpasses 99,990 points.” Players can still keep track of how much they have by counting the number of times the score resets, but this means that the record George tries to preserve on Seinfeld was basically as real as his house in the Hamptons.

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