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.