The Atari video game Centipede, Atari’s second-most popular coin-operated arcade game right after Asteroids, is an icon of video gaming. With its novel but familiar gameplay, vivid and unexpected color palette, and track-ball controller, there was nothing like it when it came out in 1981. And, incredibly, there’s a direct relationship between Centipede and GM.
Yes, GM! Huge, stogy old GM, makers of Oldsmobiles and Buicks, has a link to this new and novel world of video games, thanks to one person. Centipede was programmed, at least in part, by a programmer named Dona Bailey, a woman who learned her considerable programming chops while working at GM.
Bailey was programming computer climate control systems and engine control computers and more sophisticated computer interface systems, all using hardcore assembly code. I can’t completely confirm this, but her work likely contributed to Cadillac computer systems like this one, enjoyed by lemonade-and-ice-tea-mixing hero, Arnold Palmer:
I know now it’s hard to think of Arnold Palmer for anything but some recent comments about his pants-bound anatomy, but there was once a time where he also appreciated a good car-computer.
Meanwhile, Bailey heard a Pretenders song called “Space Invader,” and started to wonder what the hell it was talking about.
A friend took her to a bar, where she first encountered the song’s inspiration, the video game Space Invaders, and while Bailey wasn’t too impressed with the game, she found it relatable and understandable, especially in the context of the systems she’d been working with at GM.
She soon decided that video games were more exciting to work on than car control computer systems, and found that Atari was a leader in the industry, so she moved to California and resolved to get a job there.
Fortunately for her, Atari made much use of the 6502 microprocessor, which is what Bailey had learned to program while at GM. Anyone who knew how to program 6502 assembly code back in the late 1970s was a valuable commodity for Atari, so Bailey was hired, becoming the first and only woman to work at Atari’s coin-op division.
Instructed to look in a big three-ring binder of game ideas for a project to work on, Bailey skipped past the innumerable something in space shoots lasers (spelled “lazers” in all of the documents in the binder, which baffled her) and settled on a one-sentence description to pursue: “A multi segmented insect crawls on to the screen and is shot by the player.”
That became the larva that grew into the full insect that was Centipede, which Bailey worked on along with Atari legend Ed Logg.
There you go; one of the key people behind one of the true icons in early video games got her start programming 6502 CPUs for use in GM engines and cars. Without GM’s training, it’s possible Bailey would never have gone to Atari, and this game would not exist.
What an unexpected connection, right?
Bailey has written a screenplay about those early days at Atari, and I hope it gets picked up by someone, because I’d be really curious to see that.
Cut my assembly language teeth on 6502 and 6800 processors back in high school. The fun we had cracking game consoles and early apple and commodore games and software.
Why am I not surprised that they only described the mpg features and didn’t show them in the Seville commercial?
I bet she has some stories. With the exception of about two years, I’ve been the only woman in the engineering department of my company since the mid-’00s.
How big is your company? We (Semiconductor) employ a lot of women, in fact I doubt we’re too far from our goal of 30%. They’re all engineers in all disciplines.
At the corporate level, it’s somewhere around 5,000 employees total; at the location where I work, it’s 80 or so, depending on how many field service people are working.
I played a little Centipede back in my day. I will have you know that a local restaurant has a working Centipede machine and I currently have the high score on it, by a large margin. You gotta make mushroom chutes for the centipede to travel down.
Just such an eye pleasing shape it has, the Seville 🙂
Centipede was fun and all, but I was more of a Polybius guy …..or at least that’s what I remember…..
Wow cars having the same processors as the latest consumer electronics, imagine that.
Now we have voice commands that work as well as the very first version of Siri, and take about a minute to process requests.
Don’t forget car inventory getting destroyed by a chip shortage, because none of the chip manufactures wanted to make the 20 year old chips cars run on.
Dona is a hero! – not only could she program in assembly code – with almost no memory to use- she designed a classic game! I wonder if anyone under 30 knows anything about assembly?? Those were days when you had to really think and plot out what your program was going to do before you typed out your first line of code. I miss the days when I could understand 90% of what went on in a computer…
Quarters! A million allowances in quarters!
(robot voice) Fork ’em over Fork ’em over
Instead of shooting at where i was, you should have shot at where i was going to be
Tend to the widow Pac Man.
The amazing part of Centipede was the track ball. Not only was it an accurate, innovative, and intuitive human input device, Atari actually managed to make it reliable. Think of all the dirt, spilled sodas, and human DNA dropped onto that heavy little ball but I can’t recall ever playing one that didn’t roll freely, skipped, or was otherwise broken.
Back in the good old days when a gamer had to leave the house and go get a roll of quarters to play video games. (I am not sure if I meant that as snark?)
I got a pocket full of quarters, and I’m headed to the arcade
I don’t have a lot of money, but I’m bringing ev’rything I made
I’ve got a callus on my finger, and my shoulder’s hurting too
I’m gonna eat them all up, just as soon as they turn blue
‘Cause I’ve got Pac-Man fever (Pac-Man fever)
It’s driving me crazy (driving me crazy)
Thanks for that brainworm the rest of the day. It is catchy though.
“It’s Saturday night, I have no date, a 2 liter bottle of Shasta, and my all Rush mixtape. Let’s rock.”
To really do Rush right you needed about a dozen mix tapes.
“San Francisco RUSH Extreme Racing” was awesome. Even on the N64 it was still great!
My brother always got the last one!
GAHHH!!
THE LIGHT!
IT BURNS!!
That hallucinatory topshot sure is something. Had to make sure there wasn’t a gas leak in the building.
I know, right? Who’s the boot babe?
Like the green, glowing Seville, I’m going to assume a figment of my imagination.
There’s a Seville?
Oh God. If I’m living through an M. Night Shyamalan film plot where only I see the ghost of malaise era GM products, I’m out.
Oh I see it now. I was just distracted.
I dunno, but she looks like she has Sanka breath.
The car is a reference to the movie ‘Repo Man’, which came out in 1984 – a few years after Centipede.
The movie is not about github, btw.
Fun fact: the main character in the movie is named Otto, which I choose to assume is why Jason’s son is named Otto. 🙂
We need to get out of this BAD AREA!
I have often thought Jason exhibited symptoms of extreme radiation exposure. Hmmm.
Or maybe it was chainsaw lead.
That screenshot of the high scores with the player’s initials reminded me of the legendary player “FUK”, who always seemed to have 7-10 of the top 10 scores, except when he was unseated by “DIK”, or “ASS.”
“ASS” was the reigning champion at our local Mini-Mart, although “TIT” made the top two from time to time.
FUQ was popular around me possibly because it could be interpreted either in the literal way, or the thinking man’s way: “fuh queue”.
Ok, now I know who did the programming.
What I really want to know is who is responsible for that track ball and all the skin it tore off of my fingers?
That’s my biggest memory of playing Centipede too, all the times I pinched my fingers between the ball and the cabinet. Still a great game though.
They needed DNA to make all the clones of you that are toiling away in the asteroid belt.
I have to admit, I’m not much of a gamer (Tempest and Vanguard were my go-tos back in the day). My eyes sometimes glaze over with this stuff. But this is a very cool story!
Tempest is a great game. Many moons ago there was one for sale in my local Tradin’ Times for $300, yeah that’s something I should have done.
I was a tempest and zaxxon guy myself. I do not want to know how many quarters I dropped in arcades in the late 70s-mid 80s
Tempest was the one game that got your heart rate through the roof as the levels kept on getting harder and faster. I can’t believe the knob didn’t break.
Vanguard, OMG, the side-scroller that was better than Defender. I haven’t seen that game since there was a coin arcade in the town I grew up in. 1983 maybe? I’d love to see an emulator of Vanguard for PC or Wii.
Joust and Qix were my favorites. I’m happy that I can still find Joust in retro arcades around here.
Joust was so cool. I really wasn’t very good at any video game but I loved the visual stimulation and creativity of the game makers. It was so much better than playing Star Trek on a TeleType terminal like I did in college.
There used to be an open source emulator with tons of old arcade and console games in its archive. Not sure of the name or if it’s even available any more. Google probably knows.
I dumped many rolls of quarters into the Galaga and Centipede machines at my local Circle K in the early 80’s. Thanks for the fun, Ms. Bailey!
If video game and pinball enthusiasts are ever in the San Francisco Bay Area (actually Santa Clara, South Bay) the last weekend in July (usually), California Extreme is a wonderful annual weekend event with new and old pinball machine and video games.
https://caextreme.org/
Typically the main event takes up a couple of those large meeting/ballrooms and the cacophony when you walk in is glorious! I’ve been a number of times and loved it every time.
Same here, did like the no later qbert and galaga. Still don’t play video games. Did spend way too much on pinball.
I’m curious if she had any input into the sequel, Millipede. Centipede was great but Millipede took it to another level, just completely frenetic to my recollection.
I miss the old coin-op days, what a time.
They were both amazing, but Millipede was definitely harder. Like how the difficult Defender got exponentially more so with Stargate.
I LOVED Defender but I was absolutely terrible at it. The quarters just went too quickly. If I’d had a chance to play for free, over time maybe I would have been able to be merely bad at it.
Stargate was just out of control, pretty sure it was just a cruel joke. I still tried to play it though, just because it was so hard.
To me, Defender is one of those golden-age icons, seemingly at every pizza joint and rollerskating rink back then. I was completely terrible, but likewise loved it. I later had the Atari 2600 cartridge version which was massively easier to play, if less fun.
Williams released a contemporary version in the 2000s for the PS2 which was a hoot – 3d movement, different Defender ships, and all manner of weapons that could be acquired to protect the colonists!
I also was a Millipede fan. More dimension than Centipede. There were so many side-to-side moving games, and being able to move up and down was refreshing.
Agreed. Probably what helped make Spy Hunter so awesome.
Nah, that was all 8-bit Mancini.
That didn’t hurt 😉
Arcade version:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qqw6yRlWc2c
Oh wow, those solos! I always loved this game but I was shit at it so I guess I never lasted long enough to hear that unhinged free jazz wankery! Amazing, thanks for the link.
If I remember right, that craziness kicked in at the end of the boat stage. Heart pounding shit! lol