Various popular culture references and games are also included, such as Forget-Me-Not and 'Emo Goose' voiced by Phil Lester. Other characters include Doge, Archie, Dark Lord, the mascot of Hipster Whale and #thedress, a female character wearing the dress of the same name. For example, the Android version includes Android Robot, based on the operating system's Android logo. There are a number of special characters in addition to regular characters.

Some characters can only be unlocked with cash or ingame currency.

In the original mobile version, the player must hop to go forward or swipe the screen in the appropriate direction to move the character horizontally or backwards. For example, when playing as the Astronaut, the environment is space and obstacles include asteroids. By default, the character is a chicken that must cross a series of busy roads, rivers, and active train tracks, but there are hundreds of other characters, and depending on the character the environment around also changes, with the obstacles varying.

The objective of Crossy Road is to move a character through an endless path of static and moving obstacles as far as possible without dying. It was developed and published by Australian video game developer Hipster Whale, with the name and concept of the game playing on the age-old joke/ anti-joke ' Why did the chicken cross the road?' The game has also been described as endless runner version of Frogger. Crossy Road is an arcade video game released on 20 November 2014.

World record on crossy road