Woman Behind 'Centipede' Recalls Game Icon's Birth

http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2012/06/30/technology/ap-us-tec-atari-centipedes-maker.html?_r=1

by scottmey • 14 years ago

38 29 14 years ago

citricsquid3• 14 years ago

I've never heard of Centipede before, are there any other "popular" games of the time that are not talked about much any more? I know of Pac-Man, Space Invaders, games that are that much a part of pop culture, but I'd never heard of Centipede.

columbo• 14 years ago

Hrm... never heard of centipede? Not sure what you are looking for but this (http://www.liketotally80s.com/top-20-80s-arcade-games.html) has a good list...

colomon• 14 years ago

Woah, for some reason I always thought Xevious was from 1986 or so. I'm kind of shocked how many great games came out from 1980-1982...

To that list I'd add Spy Hunter (don't want to think how many quarters I sank into this without ever getting very far) and Gaplus (my favorite of the Galaxion spin-offs).

mynameishere• 14 years ago

You can play it here

http://atari.com/arcade/arcade/centipede

It's really difficult, and I think that it might have been partially designed to suck down quarters. The best Atari game is this:

http://atari.com/adventure

...yeah it looks like crap, but he crammed it into 4K, and at the time there was literally nothing like it in the world.

Most people say this is the best Atari game:

http://www.atari.com/arcade/arcade/yars-revenge

...I still remember the rather lengthy comic book that came with the cartridge explaining the plight of the yars in their struggle against the armored cannon, or whatever.

ED: found the comic. I guess it's not that long:

http://www.atariage.com/comics/comic_thumbs.html?MagazineID=...

amichail• 14 years ago

If you like Centipede, check out Gridrunner for iOS:

http://toucharcade.com/2012/02/29/gridrunner-review/

rhizome2• 14 years ago

Stargate (best sidescroller ever), Galaga...most video games from 1981-3 were amazing.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1981_in_video_gaming

waterlesscloud2• 14 years ago

Defender (the game Stargate was the sequel to) and Galaga are the icons of the era.

What amazes me is that you can still find Galaga in arcades today. If, of course, you can find arcades at all.

Dove• 14 years ago

I really liked Gravitar and Asteroids.

anigbrowl• 14 years ago

I've never heard of Centipede before

what

Well check out tempest and Super Locomotive (which hardly anyone else remembers). And Q*Bert. And Gorf.

mechanical_fish• 14 years ago

Tempest and QBert are excellent.

Try to find an actual historic arcade. The games make more sense in context. In particular, Tempest has been redone in a dozen forms, but without the original spinner controller it's just not the same.

(QBert, on the other hand, is just fine in emulation.)

In the Northeast you can go to Funspot:

http://www.classicarcademuseum.org/

It's got the flavor of the real thing. Takes me back to the old days.

waterlesscloud2• 14 years ago

Berzerk and its sequel Frenzy.

Robotron:2084.

Gravitar.

Bosconian.

Red Baron and Battlezone.

Many, many quarters spent.

caseorganic2• 14 years ago

Was excited to read the article for the history on Centipede, then had to filter through a tired rant on gender in order to get to it.

In contract, this interview with PacMan inventor Toru Iwatani in Programmers at Work is absolutely fantastic. http://programmersatwork.wordpress.com/toru-iwatani-1986-pac...

aiiane2• 14 years ago

If you want to stop reading "tired rants on gender", perhaps you should try and make it unnecessary for those rants to exist.

citricsquid3• 14 years ago

Are you saying that caseorganic's desire not to read rants about gender mean that he is sexist? That seems like a baseless (and insulting) assumption...

kabdib• 14 years ago

My officemate at Atari was a woman, one of the very few female programmers there. We worked on game cartridges for the Atari 400/800 for a couple of years; mostly we had separate projects, but we helped each other with code from time to time.

She was hired into our group with a /little/ programming experience, and had no knowledge at all about how the 400/800 computer worked. Fortunately she was a fast learner; she read a lot, asked lots of questions, and we were able to get her up to speed. Took about ten months for her to write her first cartridge (most projects were on the order of six months -- more, and you'd start getting the stink-eye from management).

Atari really did just throw people into projects, with little support or training. You just had to figure stuff out. I don't think this was even a conscious strategy, it was more like they got lucky enough that things tended to work out. (NB: Not a great long term strategy; Atari fell apart pretty quickly when things started to /not/ work out, and they didn't know what to fix, much less how).

A clone of Centipede is what got me a job at Atari. I was bummed that I never met Dona.

mikek• 14 years ago

I wish the article said more about the game's development and less about the gender of its creator.

mhartl2• 14 years ago

I think they meant to say "Programmer Behind 'Centipede' Recalls Game Icon's Birth".

mhartl2• 14 years ago

It's amazing how many more people complain about this:

Women receive fewer than a fifth of the bachelor's degrees awarded in computer science...

than this:

...even though they get nearly 60 percent of all bachelor's degrees...

NonEUCitizen• 14 years ago

The article also mentioned:

"In 1980, 30 percent of the computer science degrees went to women."

If true, why is the percentage going down?

jkmcf• 14 years ago

The number of men went up?

mahyarm• 14 years ago

People are starting to complain more about the second fact more and more nowadays, even compared to 2 years ago. Will there start to be widespread men's only scholarships soon and other affirmative action style things for men? Who knows.

cg• 14 years ago

There arguably already are.

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_162-20111646-503544.html

genwin• 14 years ago

My son likes programming-ish things (like modding games). My daughter likes shopping and texting. I'm pretty sure it has something to do with one being a boy and the other being a girl. (Yet more female software developers would be great!)

Woman Behind 'Centipede' Recalls Game Icon's Birth

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