Woman Behind 'Centipede' Recalls Game Icon's Birth
1–10 of 32 posts
Re: Woman Behind 'Centipede' Recalls Game Icon's Birth
#2I'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.
Re: Woman Behind 'Centipede' Recalls Game Icon's Birth
#3I'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.
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...
Re: Woman Behind 'Centipede' Recalls Game Icon's Birth
#4Was 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...
Re: Woman Behind 'Centipede' Recalls Game Icon's Birth
#5I'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.
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:
...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=...
Re: Woman Behind 'Centipede' Recalls Game Icon's Birth
#6I'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.
[deleted]
Re: Woman Behind 'Centipede' Recalls Game Icon's Birth
#7Was 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...
If you want to stop reading "tired rants on gender", perhaps you should try and make it unnecessary for those rants to exist.
Re: Woman Behind 'Centipede' Recalls Game Icon's Birth
#8I'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.
If you like Centipede, check out Gridrunner for iOS:
Re: Woman Behind 'Centipede' Recalls Game Icon's Birth
#9My 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.
Re: Woman Behind 'Centipede' Recalls Game Icon's Birth
#10I'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.
Millipede 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.