Centipede is a 1980 fixed shooter arcade developed and published by Atari. It was co-created by Dona Bailey and Ed Logg and became one of the most commercially successful games from the golden age of arcade video games.

Dona was one of the first female programmers in the industry. According to Dona, “Centipede was the closest to alchemy that I’ll ever achieve.”

A mysterious origin story… Dona plucked the idea for Centipede from a notebook of game ideas that was produced from a regular Atari brainstorming session. She reviewed over 40 game ideas before deciding to start work on Centipede. No one to this day knows who originally dreamed up the idea or wrote it down in the notebook.

Mushrooms were created to debug collisions… The original gameplay for Centipede involved a blank screen. Dona intuited that players would be upset if visual collisions on screen didn’t score correctly. In order to test collisions, Dona placed bitmap stamps throughout the screen. Upon playing it, Dona realized the addition of the blocks made it look like a maze. Dona wondered if this block used to debug the game could become a feature, and mushrooms were born.

From the arcade to the living room... Based on the success of the original arcade version, Atari created, produced, and distributed this game cartridge in 1983 to support at-home gameplay on the recently released Atari 2600. This replica cartridge, in black, signifies the overwhelmingly success of Centipede as it moved from an Atari brainstorming session to arcades then to living rooms around the world.