Centipede

Mushrooms, spiders, fleas, and an endlessly crawling centipede zigzagging down the screen straight toward your gun barrel. Centipede is a hypnotically fast arcade game that can turn calm into utter panic within seconds, and on the Atari 7800 it belongs among the system's flagship conversions.

You control a small shooter at the bottom edge of the screen and rain fire down on the centipede as it chews its way down through a field of mushrooms. Each hit to the centipede's body splits it into two separate, even more troublesome pieces, and another mushroom sprouts at the point of impact. The field thus gradually fills with obstacles, among which spiders, fleas, and scorpions slip through, threatening you from several directions at once. The game is best controlled with a trackball, which allows lightning-fast repositioning of the shooter.

Centipede was released by Atari in 1981, and one of its co-authors was Dona Bailey, one of the few female programmers in the arcade industry of the time. The game also became famous for the fact that, thanks to more pastel colors and a less aggressive aesthetic, it attracted a broader audience, including many female players, which was remarkable for that era.

The title became one of Atari's most commercially successful arcade cabinets and saw a number of ports to home systems as well as a sequel called Millipede. Its addictive pace and constantly changing playfield made it a benchmark of the so-called field shooters, where enemies arrive in swarms and the pressure never lets up.

The Atari 7800 version is among the successful ones, smooth and vibrantly colored, thanks to which it retains the hectic charm of the original even in home conditions. It's exactly the type of game where you tell yourself just one more round and suddenly it's past midnight.

Why play: A hectic, addictive shooter with a constantly changing playfield and a piece of gaming history in the form of co-author Dona Bailey.