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Woman Behind 'Centipede' Recalls Game Icon's Birth
- citricsquid 14y agoI'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 14y agoHrm... never heard of centipede? Not sure what you are looking for but this (http://www.liketotally80s.com/top-20-80s-arcade-games.html http://www.liketotally80s.com/top-20-80s-arcade-games.html) has a good list...
- colomon 14y agoWoah, 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 14y agoYou can play it here http://atari.com/arcade/arcade/centipede 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 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 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=48 http://www.atariage.com/comics/comic_thumbs.html?MagazineID=...
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- amichail 14y agoIf you like Centipede, check out Gridrunner for iOS: http://toucharcade.com/2012/02/29/gridrunner-review/ http://toucharcade.com/2012/02/29/gridrunner-review/
- thedelimiter 14y agoMillipede is the more intense version... I used to be covered in sweat after a half hour of playing Millipede at the train station. It gets more intense than modern FPS shooters.
- rhizome 14y agoStargate (best sidescroller ever), Galaga...most video games from 1981-3 were amazing. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1981_in_video_gaming http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1981_in_video_gaming
- waterlesscloud 14y agoDefender (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.
- rhizome 14y agoDefender (1980?) was great, but Stargate improved and built upon pretty much every aspect of it the same way that Galaga was an all-around improvement over Galaxian.
- Dove 14y agoI really liked Gravitar and Asteroids.
- anigbrowl 14y agoI'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 14y agoTempest 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/ http://www.classicarcademuseum.org/ It's got the flavor of the real thing. Takes me back to the old days.
- tptacek 14y agoIn Chicago (or, at least, down the street from me in the near-west suburbs) we have Galloping Ghost, which is $15 for unlimited all-day play; they have both Tempest (every time we've talked about going, Erin asks "but do they have Tempest?") and Q*Bert.
- waterlesscloud 14y agoBerzerk and its sequel Frenzy. Robotron:2084. Gravitar. Bosconian. Red Baron and Battlezone. Many, many quarters spent.
- caseorganic 14y agoWas 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-pacman-designer/ http://programmersatwork.wordpress.com/toru-iwatani-1986-pac...
- aiiane 14y agoIf you want to stop reading "tired rants on gender", perhaps you should try and make it unnecessary for those rants to exist.
- citricsquid 14y agoAre 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...
- enf 14y agoCaseorganic is a woman, by the way.
- citricsquid 14y agoI guess that makes me sexist for assuming male heh, what a plot twist! I'll leave my post as is for posterity.
- caseorganic 14y agoI'm the opposite of offended. :)
- aiiane 14y agoEh, more just my own little rant about rants about rants. >_>
- kabdib 14y agoMy 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 14y agoI wish the article said more about the game's development and less about the gender of its creator.
- mhartl 14y agoI think they meant to say "Programmer Behind 'Centipede' Recalls Game Icon's Birth".
- mhartl 14y agoIt'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 14y agoThe article also mentioned: "In 1980, 30 percent of the computer science degrees went to women." If true, why is the percentage going down?
- jkmcf 14y agoThe number of men went up?
- mahyarm 14y agoPeople 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 14y agoThere arguably already are. http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_162-20111646-503544.html http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_162-20111646-503544.html
- genwin 14y agoMy 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!)