This Week In Retro: Centipede [1981]

June 1981: Atari leaves outer space behind in favor of a bug hunt

by Diamond Feit

I would never dare to lament the evolution of video games (or any medium) with the dreaded phrase "back in my day," but there is a fundamental difference between the way games existed when I was a kid versus the experience of today's children. In the earliest days of video games, there was barely an "industry" to speak of, just a series of wild swings at artistic expression with a coin box attached. While the first game to become a legit phenomenon was a loose interpretation of an actual sport, the medium quickly expanded into the abstract. Think about how easy it is to explain Pong to a person who has never seen it; without using any gestures I could easily describe it to the point that a stranger could draw an accurate representation of the real thing based solely on my words. You couldn't do the same with Space Invaders or Pac-Man.

Video games of this era were necessarily surreal because the technology to simulate real life just wasn't an option. Sports games at the time could barely express the fundamentals of tennis, so complex team-based contests like baseball or basketball were reduced to stick-men shuffling through space, fumbling over square balls. These limitations certainly closed the doors on a lot of concepts, but they also opened a window to alternative, far-out ideas that wouldn't make sense in any other medium.

In June 1981, Atari released one of the company's stranger ideas into arcades. It's a shooter, though one far-removed from Space Invaders or Missile Command. The game features a plain black background but doesn't seem to be set in outer space at all, as the enemies and obstacles are terrestrial in design. There's also a question of scale: Is the player controlling a tiny ship, or are they fighting giant enemies? Both answers are equally plausible, for 1981's Centipede does not offer a narrative either way.

Centipede is a fast-paced game that feels significantly more advanced than other shooters of its time, even if the premise is no more complex than "shoot the enemies as they approach." In this case, the biggest threat is the eponymous multi-segmented insect that scurries from the top of the screen towards the bottom. While it moves in a predictable path, the unpredictable layout of the stage means players have little time to anticipate or adapt to the creature before it is already roaming the lower half of the screen.

Centipede challenges players by covering the playfield with what seems to be a random assortment of mushrooms. The fungi block the path of bug and player alike, though the player can fire at the 'shrooms to clear a path. Bumping into a mushroom forces the crawler to reverse direction and descend one step closer towards the player. Should the centipede encounter a tight passage of mushrooms, it can end up zipping downwards in seconds.

When the player successfully shoots the centipede, two things happen. First, the remaining segments of the creature continue to move, meaning that victory only comes when every single piece of the insect is dead. Second, the struck segment of the centipede turns into a mushroom, thereby diverting the path of all segments that had been trailing behind it. While expert players can use this to their advantage, forcing the bugs into a narrow column for easy pickings, beginner players can easily shoot themselves into a sticky situation.

There are other insectoid hazards to avoid, such as spiders who skitter in erratic patterns, fleas that fly straight down (leaving a vertical trail of mushrooms behind), and scorpions who "poison" mushrooms to make the centipede more hostile. The mix of enemy bugs, the proliferance of mushrooms, and the assortment of sounds which overlap one another make Centipede a sensory overload at times. Its distinct din, along with the cabinet's bright green artwork and pastel-color sprites on screen, made the game stand out amongst other arcade games at the time both visually and aurally.

Centipede had one more uncommon feature, albeit one that no one could see outside of Atari's internal offices: Programmer Dona Bailey was one of the few women working at the company and she was the only one employed as a software engineer. While she was hardly the sole developer behind Centipede, her impact on the game's design cannot be overstated. The bright colors were her idea, as was the use of a trackball controller because she wasn't comfortable with the alternatives. Centipede would go on to become one of the top-three biggest arcade hits of 1982, in part due its large female fanbase; Bailey's influence was likely a factor in the game's crossover appeal, given how few women tended to visit arcades at the time.

Even though Centipede absolutely belongs in the same conversation as Pac-Man or Donkey Kong, its legacy is significantly stunted. I suspect the trackball controls that made it an arcade hit also limited its appeal on consoles or PCs, as the game just doesn't feel the same on a joystick or D-pad. It had one sequel, Millipede, which was successful but did little to expand upon the original game. The two titles have been bundled together and ported to a variety of platforms in the decades since.

Centipede received a 3D makeover twice, both times being reimagined as a shooter where the player freely explores a map and can fire in any direction. This change robs Centipede of what made it appealing in the first place; it was never about shooting the bugs, but facing the tension of bugs and mushrooms while locked into a small space. Anyone who enjoys firing weapons at giant insects would be better served with any Earth Defense Force title rather than a brand from 1981 masquerading as a completely different game.

I don't think there's a place for Centipede in modern gaming; it wasn't unique in function but it had just enough peculiarities to carve a niche for itself 40 years ago. A 2021 version of Centipede would no doubt require some kind of narrative justification for the action. If that sounds ridiculous, consider that in 2016 Atari was all too happy to announce a movie adaptation of Centipede that has yet to surface. Surely a script exists by now, and ten bucks says that whoever the hero is, a centipede kills their family in the first act so that this time...it's personal.

Diamond Feit lives in Osaka, Japan but is forever online, sharing idle thoughts on Twitter and playing games on Twitch.