Centipede

Posted by: Paul Smith

Dona Bailey was one of the only female programmers involved in gaming at the turn of the 1980s. As a representative of a gender not traditionally at ease with insects, spiders, and creepy crawlies generally, it is perhaps remarkable that she threw her creative and technical know-how into a game about a giant centipede. The subject of track three on our Pac Man Fever odyssey, Centipede itself is not one of the more immediately recognisable games featured on the album, but spawned a litany of similar games, including the pre-3G mobile phone standard. Atari released Centipede in 1980, and it was one of the first games to become familiar to home console players. It is fair to say that the album track is a less familiar landmark in popular culture, although artwork adorning the side of the arcade cabinet was used on the cover of the Strokes' 2004 single Reptillia.
Centipede is an original and ingenious, if relatively complicated, game. The controls were original, too: Centipede was the first arcade game to use a trackball, pipping the formidable and better known Missile Command to the post by a matter of weeks. The trackball moved a strange human head like object, which represented the player, as they blazed away at the oncoming centipede with a laser. Hitting the centipede caused it to either divide and come at the player in separate sections (if you hit it in the middle) or create a mushroom (if you don't.) It is these mushrooms, as well as the added attraction of killing the player, which spurs the centipede, in its various dismembered forms, on. The more mushrooms there are, the faster the little beastie moves. The player will also find spiders descending towards him, flies buzzing about the place, and scorpions wandering around the middle of the screen. Contact with any of these will bring about predictable results.

Perhaps most unique of all in this, the slightly weird cousin you only meet a weddings of an arcade game, was that it was very easy for players to take advantage of 'cheats'. These included the 'blob' and the 'trap', variations on the same theme whereby skilled players could effectively corner the centipede and rack up millions of points. Literally, millions of points. The world record for the game stands at over 25,000,000 points, achieved in a myopia-inducing thirty hour stint by one Billy Mitchell, of Florida USA. Interestingly, neither the progammers nor Atari, who distributed the game, saw any need to remove these cheats, electing instead to simply produce two official sets of high scores: 'marathon', for players employing the cheats, and 'tournament', for scores attained though open play. This seems to miss the very real cheating opportunity to trap and blob your way to a massive score, and then claim that you hadn't. In any case, only tournament scores are counted today, which means that Donald Hayes' 7,111,111 point effort in 2000 is recognised as the 'real' high score. Hayes was honoured by his hero-hungry home town (Salem, New Hampshire) for this achievement.

Towards the end of Ode To A Centipede, the Pac Man Fever track, a slightly sinister spoken word section, mentions the centipede attacking the player from 'the rocks down below'. There aren't any rocks in Centipede. However, as no one has ever listened to more than twenty seconds of the track, the track gets away with it.

Next week it's the turn of bonkers arcade monolith Donkey Kong. Dancing shoes should be sturdy, non-slip, and able to deal with ladders and enraged primatess hurling barrels about the place.
 

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