*So, hey, guys, remember this little project where I played through like ten or eleven games from the seventies and did these write-ups about them? And then I just quit? Well, I’m, yeah, I think I’m starting back up, at least for a few reviews.
*Okay, so looking back, I see that I had, in fact, played and reviewed the first 11 games from the book, 1001 Video Games You Must Play Before You Die. That wrapped up the seventies and started us into 1980. Just to kind of reorient us, I’m going to do something I rarely do on here anymore, which is link to my website, Absolute Knave. Here’s my page on the 1001 Video Games project. That’ll be easier than trolling through the back pages of this thread to try to find any of the reviews if you want them.
*Anyway, we started in 1971 with The Oregon Trail and, quickly, went through Pong, Breakout, Boot Hill, Combat, Space Invaders, Adventure, Asteroids, Galaxian & Lunar Lander to wrap up the seventies. So, that’s ten games for the entire decade of the 70s.
*Then we moved on to 1980, which, just 1980 alone, has 11 games, more than the entirety of the 70s. Anyway, we started 1980 with Battlezone and then I quit. So, that leads us neatly up to game 2 from 1980 (may . . . be?; more on that in a second), so let’s get started with another arcade game from Atari.
Centipede (1980) – Atari
*Okay, so you may remember that for this series, for somewhat arbitrary reasons, I decided to go with this “bullet-point” review style. In contrast to my more traditional “paragraph” style reviews, this style is a little looser, more conversational.
*A trainwreck, basically.
*Anyway, yes, we will be talking about the video game Centipede and there’s a lot to talk about: its historic designer, the confusion surrounding its exact release date &, of course, the gameplay.
*But first playing this game sparked a thought in my mind and so I just briefly want to talk about an idea I had for a movie tie-in game.
*Yes, I am, of course, talking about a movie tie-in game for The Human Centipede.
*So, look, if you don’t want to read about this, skip down about . . . you know what, I’m just going to spoiler tag this whole discussion. Nobody wants to read about this. The Human Centipede was almost fifteen years ago. Nobody wants to think about it anymore.
*Oh, by the way, did you know that Tom Six, the auteur of the Human Centipede trilogy, actually did another movie in 2020 called The Onania Club which is about women who gain sexual gratification from misery. I don’t know if it’s their own misery or someone else’s misery because if you think I’m clicking more than one link about that movie, you’re out of your mind.
*So, anyway, if you’ve seen ALL the Human Centipede movies, there’s something to look forward to, I guess.
*You know what, this is actually just gross. Let’s skip it. I did have a genuine idea for a game, but I kind of don’t actually want to talk about it. But since I don’t edit these bullet-point reviews, the above discussion will stay where it is, I guess.
*Okay, so on to the actual video game Centipede.
*So, about the release date. The book states that the game was released in arcade format, which was its original format, in 1980; Wikipedia, on the other hand, states that the arcade game was released in 1981, specifically on June 6th. That kind of specificity would make me think the Wikipedia article is right. But . . .IMDB, which does have a lot of good info on video games if you didn’t know, has a very specific date as well, July 26 1980.
*I’m tempted to do more research, but no.
*LOOK IM NOT A JOURNALIST
*Anyway, I went with the book. It’s the list I’m using, so I’m putting Centipede here in 1980. Also, I played it at this point before I knew there were different release dates out there, so, yeah, I’m going with this.
*So, Dona Bailey, born in Little Rock, Arkansas in 1955. Real bright girl. Graduated high school at 16 and she plunged into college, taking classes all year-round, leading to her graduating college at the age of 19 with a Bachelor’s degree in Psychology, with three minors in English, Math & Biology. She then went on to get a Master’s in math.
*And then, after briefly working at General Motors as an assembly language programmer (because why do something that actually connected to any of her five fields of study?), she heard a little song by a band called The Pretenders, a song called Space Invader.
*So, yeah, back when I reviewed Space Invaders, I talked about how a lot of the titans of the game industry directly trace their entry into the field back to Space Invaders. Guess I should have included Dona Bailey, though I don’t know that she exactly went on to be a “titan;” what she unquestionably was, however, was historic.
*Because after playing Space Invaders at a local bar, she did a little investigating and found that Atari arcade cabinets used the same microprocessor she was working on at GM. So, off to Sunnyvale, California for Dona. And she became the first woman hired in the arcade division at Atari.
*She wasn’t the first woman game designer at Atari (or, in fact, in the industry as a whole). Carol Shaw is, I think, pretty widely considered the first female commercial video game designer; in 1978, she designed 3-D Tic-Tac-Toe for Atari, specifically for their 2600 home console.
*Dona Bailey became the first female designer of an arcade game, I believe, when she looked over a list of game ideas and decided that the only one that looked interesting to her involved a bug making its way down a screen. While she was a bit turned off by just how much “lasering and frying things” dominated the list, she would later say that it didn’t seem bad to kill a bug.
*So, Bailey and Ed Logg headed up the development of Centipede; Logg would later say that he did most of the design and Bailey did most of the programming. And Bailey was responsible for some of the color design of the game which was more pastel than most games of the time. Think about Galaxian, which feels like the most colorful game to this point; I suppose it’s all very bright and poppy primary colors. With Centipede, Bailey chose the pastel color scheme herself.
*This was because Bailey and Logg very purposely set out to make a game that would specifically appeal to women.
*Which is honestly kind of weird to me. Like what about killing a centipede seems to speak directly to women? Is it because it’s related to gardening? Seems weird, but whatever.
*And, I guess, yeah, I don’t know what I’m talking about, because Centipede became the first arcade game with women making up more than half of the players.
*I have no idea how they even did the numbers on that. I mean, it seems a little sus, as the kids say, but okay.
*Holy ****, is this an actual ad from the period? I take it all back. This ad would absolutely get women in arcades playing this game.
*Anyway, all that sociological and historical context aside, is Centipede a good game? Sure.
*On its face, it is yet another in a long line of Space Invaders inspired games, but this one is, as Galaxian is, more than just a clone. It makes some pretty cool mechanical innovations.
*So, you’re at the bottom of the screen and the centipede starts at the top and does the classic side to side descent. But the screen is also copiously littered with mushrooms and when the centipede hits a mushroom, it doubles back. So, it doesn’t go all the way to the end of the row always or even most of the time. If it hits a mushroom in the middle of the row, it turns and moves down.
*As you can see, on higher levels the mushroom count gets really high and if a cluster of mushrooms is arranged in the right way, it can lead to the centipede just moving very quickly toward the bottom of the screen.
*This also leads toward one of the things I really liked about this game, which is just the aesthetics of the centipede. I like the way it moves. Something about the way it turns and goes through some of the smaller openings between mushrooms does feel really insectile to me. It has some personality. It’s the first video game enemy I’ve encountered that really feels . . . alive maybe? Like more than just pixels moving on a screen. When it suddenly hits a cluster of mushrooms and it just slithers through them and comes down several rows very quickly, it does kind of give me a spike of panic. It’s pretty cool.
*As you can also see from that gif, every time you shoot a segment of the centipede, the centipede breaks. The segment you hit becomes a mushroom, the segment right behind that segment becomes a centipede head and suddenly you’ve got two centipedes coming at you.
*Strategically then it’s obviously best to try to take them out quickly. You don’t want too many different centipedes moving independently on the screen. So, take them out from the rear, which is not always easy. And when smaller centipedes break off, take them out quickly. About the worst scenario is like fifteen different centipede heads all moving independently around the screen.
*Trust me. I know.
*One final mechanical innovation is the ability to move forward and backward as the player. Even in Galaxian, which makes a ton of innovations, you can still only move back and forth across the very bottom line of the screen. In Centipede, you can move forward a few lines so that gives you some extra play, which is helpful, especially in dealing with the supporting characters: spiders, fleas, scorpions, etc., all of whom move in various different ways. They also interact with the environment in different ways; some of them remove mushrooms when they pass over them; others drop mushrooms at random times.
*It should also be noted that you don’t automatically lose when the centipede hits the bottom of the screen which is cool and surprising. If you can dodge the centipede while it’s in your play area, it will start moving back up once it hits the bottom and you have more opportunities to shoot it.
*I also forgot to mention that I was fortunate enough to be able to play this game on an original arcade cabinet. If you’re ever in the Tulsa area, check out the Max Retropub; it’s a bar with an eighties theme and as part of that theme, it’s got a ton of vintage arcade games in it. It has some of those retrofitted machines where they’re machines with a lot of games loaded on them, but it also has some really old cabinets, like a really old Space Invaders that is still playable. And, of course, Centipede.
*Anyway, at the end of the day, what about Centipede? It’s really good. It’s obviously inspired by Space Invaders, but that’s no crime. And I think it brings enough new innovations to the Space Invaders model that it feels like its own thing. The mushrooms and the way the various insect characters interact with them feels very unique. And, as I said above, the centipede itself feels like the closest thing to an organic video game enemy, by which I mean that it feels like it has a personality and its movement feels organic, not routine.
*I played the arcade cabinet for about thirty minutes and never got tired of it. It’s still not quite the sweat-inducer that Space Invaders is; I’m telling you, it’s the music.
*So, there we go. Centipede! Next time, we’ll be sticking with 1980 and hitting up another arcade classic and this one’s from a company I don’t think we’ve encountered before, namely the Williams company, branching out from pinball to video games with Defender!