Atari Centepede

Centipede, completed in 1981, was an Atari coin-operated game that swiftly won a wide following in the arcades. Apart from its smooth game play, Centipede was praised for its refreshing approach to screen colors and for its whimsical mushroom world.

The Creation of Centipede

Centipede was written by veteran Atari designer Ed Logg, who has become something of a legend in the world of video games, and a young game programmer who was credited with bringing a gentler touch to the world of video games with the enchanted mushroom patch.
Steve Calfee: "Ed Logg is the world's greatest games designer. He's done the most, the best games. His line up starts with Asteroids, which probably still is the biggest run we ever did. He's in [a long line of games]. He's kind of like Pete Rose; he has the most hits and he's also probably got the most strike outs. He just goes up to bat."

Remembrances from the Video Game Masters

The mushroom patch with its tenacious, never-say-die centipedes, bouncing spiders, mushroom-laying fleas and transforming scorpions provided an imaginative leap for players, just as did the hoards of aliens in Tempest, the outer space adventures of Asteroids, the eerie battlefields of Battlezone and even the frightful scenarios of Missile Command. Of these times, and the games that emerged from Atari, Rich Adam said: "We were a young group of fun people who were sort of treading on untrodden territory. We were out exploring what technology could do to entertain adolescent minds, and we were adolescent minds."
In the early days of personal computers, before they became commonplace, and before sophisticated gaming programs were available for them, the arcades (and wherever else the coin-operated games were located) were the portals into these new fantasy worlds. And a river of quarters carried players into the electronic realms. Dan Pliskin described the coin-operated video game business as follows:"It was a wacky, extremely competitive business. I was there when coin-operated games were earning $8 billion in quarters a year. These games were outgrossing the record industry and the movie industry combined, in quarters! And when you looked at who was manufacturing these games, it was just a couple of Japanese companies and a few American companies. . . . There was incredible competition, all for kids' lunch and church money!
The quarters are still rolling in. Dan Plishkin continued: "People say that video games have already seen their heyday and business has definitely gone downhill. Maybe it has gone downhill. Maybe it's only $4 billion worth of quarters now. It's still one heck of an industry."

Popular from the Start

The prototype games were hand-built, wire-wrapped, one-of-a kinds that were created by the development team prior to ordering the circuit boards for the mass-produced versions. With just a single machine, people would come in at all hours of the night to play a new game. Dan Plishkin: "One of the things that kind of allowed everybody at Atari to have kind of a loose and enjoyable relationship was that management was kind of loose, too. An example of that happened with one of Howard Delman's games. I can't remember which one it was, but we sent the one and only prototype wire-wrapped version of Howie's game off to the AMOA (Amusement and Music Operators Association) show with strict orders not to sell it."
Of course the game was sold anyway, and a new prototype had to be assembled back at the labs. Dan Plishkin continued:"Several months later Howie gets a call from the person who bought this game. It had stopped collecting money and he wanted to know how to change the settings to make it play longer, or something, to see if it would earn more money. Howie had to tell the guy that if it ever collected any money at all, it was a miracle because it didn't have any coin routines at all. It had none, because we had wired it for free-play when we sent it to the AMOA show!"

The Great 25-Cent Escape

Especially in the early 1980s a great many newspaper and magazine articles were written about the meaning of and possible consequences of the wave of video games that seemed to allure so many kids, and adults, to the arcades. But at the heart of it might have been the promise of a quick escape into another world. Rich Adam: "I kind of figured out, maybe years after the fact, what I think the lure of video games is. It's because people have so little control over their lives. This is especially true with kids, but even adults often have little controlover the day-to-day part of their lives. You have to go to work. You don't get to control that much of your life. But for a quarter you can control this very complex machine. You can command it. For a quarter that's quite a bargain, to be able to do that for five minutes. . . . When you're good at a game it gives you an incredible sense of power over the whole environment."