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When I was a kid in the pre-NES days, vertical shooters were a large part of my gaming diet, as they were a huge part of the gaming landscape. Since my family had home computers, I played clones more than I did the arcade originals or their official home versions on consoles like the 2600. These games generally fell into one of three major categories: Space Invaders clones, Galaxian clones, and Centipede clones. In this blog I will talk about the games that spawned the third type of shooter - Centipede and Millipede.

Space Invaders, Galaxian, Pac-Man, and other games  attributed to Atari on the 2600 in the early 80s were licensed from Japanese developers like Taito and Namco at some expense by Atari's massive parent company at the time, Warner Communications. Unlike these games, Centipede and Millipede are home-grown products originally developed by Atari in Sunnyvale, California, and are still owned by the present-day version of Atari. 

Like Space Invaders and Galaxian, Centipede and Millipede pitted you against giant insects. Unlike those games, Centipede went with a fantasy motif rather than a space motif, placing you in a garden of gigantic mushrooms.  These games also differed markedly from the Japanese games in other ways that made for a very hectic experience. 

Centipede (1981)

The first, most successful, and best-known game of the series. Centipede was developed by Dona Bailey, one of the first women to work in the video game industry, along with prolific Atari engineer Ed Logg. Centipede combines elements of the Japanese games and created its own style of gameplay. You control a dart-throwing shooter called a Bug Blaster- I always thought of it as a can of bug spray. The centipede advances row-by-row towards your Bug Blaster, as in Space Invaders, while other enemies, in particular the spiders that crawl across the bottom of the screen, try to dive-bomb you, as in Galaxian. The centipede drops down one row when it hits either the edge of the screen or one the mushrooms, which act not only to speed up the centipede's progress towards you, but also as solid obstacles for your shots. Since the enemies in Centipede and Millipede don't shoot back at you, the mushrooms are purely a liability unlike the shields in Space Invaders, taking four shots each to destroy and awarding you one point. Every segment of the centipede you destroy turns into a mushroom for other centipedes to bump against, and the game incentivizes you to aim for the head of the centipede in both points awarded and in terms of game mechanics. Hitting the centipede in the middle splits it into multiple parts that crawl down separately. If you destroy too many mushrooms, a flea starts dropping vertically from the sky, laying columns of mushrooms as it drops. In addition, a scorpion periodically crawls across the screen. The scorpion never enters the player's field of movement, but it does "poison" mushrooms that it crawls over so that any centipede that touches these poisoned mushrooms makes a beeline for the bottom of the screen. As with Space Invaders, the centipede reaching the bottom of the screen causes additional problems, though not a game over. The centipede completely fragments, and additional centipede heads begin crawling out. All this time, you have to constantly dodge the spider, which meanders up and down through your playfield while it crosses the screen, though the spider can't backtrack. 

The result of all this is a brutally hectic, fast-paced game that forces you to divide your attention between the top and bottom of the screen. Ignore the bottom of the screen and the spider is likely to destroy you. Ignore the top of the screen and you'll be swarmed with centipedes and having to hack through walls of mushrooms. Centipede is definitely not a relaxing game. 

Compared to Space Invaders and Galaxian, your shooter has much more mobility. It can move in eight directions throughout the bottom third of the screen instead of on a left-to-right horizontal axis. As with many of Atari's games at the time, the arcade version of Centipede was controlled with a Trak-Ball, Atari's trademarked name for a ball controller similar to an upside-down mouse, though its controls generally transitioned well onto home joysticks and even modern controllers. 

Centipede was a huge success. In the arcades, it was outsold only by the two Pac-Man games and Donkey Kong in terms of machine sales in 1982. It was Atari's second best-selling arcade cabinet after Asteroids. The 2600 version sold 1.5 million copies, which was a huge success in 1982. Along with Pac-Man, it was one of the most popular video games for women and girls, with over half of its audience believed to be female. It is a key game in Atari collections and has also received a few remakes over the years, including a well-known remake for the PS1.

Millipede (1982)

A year later, trying to keep Centipede's success going, Atari developed a sequel, Millipede. Ed Logg returned for Millipede, along with a young video game engineer named Mark Cerny, who would become a very important figure in video gaming a few short years later. 

This game was an interative sequel on more advanced hardware rather than an attempt at making a completely different, "bigger and better," product, and overall is one of the better sequels of the early 80s. Once again, you are in a giant mushroom maze with a shooter, who was supposed to represent an elf armed with a crossbow called "Archer", fighting an advancing millipede and other insects. Many of the insects, like the bees and earwigs, are simply reskins of Centipede enemies like the fleas and the scorpions, respectively, but there were a lot of new twists added. There are dragonflies which zig-zag from the top of the screen, and mosquitoes which descend diagonally across the screen at a very high speed. In addition, there are ladybugs, which crawl across the bottom of the screen, turning any mushrooms they touch into indestructible flowers. The millipede moves quite a bit faster than the centipede in the first game did. Oh, and the spiders are still there, and now there can be up to four spiders at a time on the screen as things get harder. The game also ramps up the speed a lot as you score more points.

In addition to the usual millipede-blasting mayhem, the bees, dragonflies, and mosquitoes will periodically "swarm". These stages act as bonus stages, but very dangerous ones, as every insect you manage to destroy during a swarm increases in value by 100 points up to a value of 1000 points.

However, the designers also give players more help in Millipede. There are tanks of DDT which, when shot, explode and wipe out everything within three squares vertically  and five squares on either side of them, including mushrooms and insects. Any insects caught in the DDT cloud are worth triple their normal point values, and they are harmless to your Archer. Periodically, an inchworm will crawl across the screen, and if you hit an inchworm with a shot, it will slow down the game for five seconds, giving you a little breathing room. 

Millipede was a success, but much less-known than Centipede. It released the year before the 1983 North American game industry crash, which cannibalized its home sales. It originally got ports for the 2600 and a version for the Atari 8-bit computers that I played quite a bit back in the day, though it was quite a bit slower than the arcade game. As the Atari 8-bit computers had the same basic architecture as the 5200, a prototype for the 5200 was completed based on the 8-bit version, but was never released. 

In 1988, Millipede even got a NES port, developed by HAL Labs under the supervision of future Nintendo president Satoru Iwata. It featured the same title theme as the NES versions of Joust and Defender 2, which were also developed by HAL, and seemed to use a lot of the sound library from the NES version of Mario Bros (the other two games used a lot of Punch-Out sound effects as well as the Punch-Out fight intro). It maintained the fast pace of the arcade game, though the earwigs did not poison mushrooms in this version.

Centipede and Millipede remain among Atari's best-known games today. They are regular features in Atari Flashback consoles, and are available in the Atari Flashback collections on Switch, PlayStation, and Xbox. Centipede had many clones on home computers, such as Caterpillar for the TRS-80. It had an arcade clone, built on Galaxian hardware by a small company, called War of the Bugs, or Monsterous Manouvers [sic] in a Mushroom Maze.  There was even a Centipede board game by Milton-Bradley. Centipede remains well-known as a part of the canon of Golden Age arcade classics, and Millipede is an excellent sequel.