Among the home ports of arcade classics on the Atari 2600, Centipede is one of those remembered with a smile and not a sigh. While the infamous Pac-Man port became a symbol of how to botch a conversion, Centipede showed it could go the other way too — faithful, playable and with respect for the original.
Atari's arcade Centipede from 1981, whose creation also involved Dona Bailey (one of the first female programmers in the game industry), placed the player in the role of a sort of magician or shooter at the bottom edge of the screen. A centipede snakes its way across a field of mushrooms, and you must shoot it to pieces — but every hit to its middle splits it into two separate segments, so the chaos grows. Add to that spiders, fleas and scorpions, and you have a recipe for hectic, colorful madness.
The home version on the 2600 was among the well-crafted conversions that managed to carry the speed and juice of the source over even to limited hardware. Together with other titles it formed the backbone of the console's library in the period after 1982 and helped keep the 2600 relevant in a time of intensifying competition.
Centipede was one of the first arcade games to deliberately target a female audience as well, and its friendly, almost cute aesthetic set it apart from the grim space shooters of the time. This accessibility made it one of the most commercially successful arcade machines of its era.
The combination of simple controls and gradually increasing difficulty makes Centipede a textbook example of addictive arcade design. No wonder the brand received sequels and modern remakes and is perceived to this day as one of the pillars of the golden age of the arcades.
Why play: A well-done home port of one of the most addictive arcades of the eighties — colorful, fast and instantly understandable madness that hasn't aged.
Game 15 of 69 for Atari 2600
The same title elsewhere (4)
The 1981 arcade original remains the benchmark, with smooth animation of the centipede and its swarm of spiders and fleas against brightly colored mushroom fields. The Atari 2600 port ranks among that machine's best-regarded conversions — unlike the infamously botched Pac-Man port, developers here kept the gameplay and pace intact despite blockier graphics and the 2600's limited palette. The Atari 5200 had stronger hardware, so its version offered smoother movement and colors closer to the arcade original than the older 2600. Anyone wanting the truest experience should choose the arcade version, while anyone after the best early-1980s home conversion will appreciate the Atari 5200.
