Centipede, released by Atari in 1981, stands out from its golden-age peers for two reasons: its trackball-driven gameplay was genuinely different from the joystick shooters surrounding it, and it was co-designed by Dona Bailey, one of the very few women working as a game designer in the arcade industry at the time.
A Different Kind of Shooter
Instead of a joystick, Centipede put a trackball under the player’s palm, letting you glide your blaster smoothly across the bottom of the screen while a segmented centipede wound its way down through a field of mushrooms above. Shoot a body segment and it splits into two shorter centipedes; shoot the head and the whole thing keeps coming, just shorter. Add in spiders, fleas, and scorpions that poison mushrooms as they pass, and the result was a game about managing chaos rather than simply aiming and firing — closer to a puzzle under time pressure than a pure reflex test.
Dona Bailey’s Role
Bailey joined Atari’s coin-op division as a programmer in 1980 after a background in assembly-language programming, and at the time was the only woman on the company’s game design team. She partnered with veteran designer Ed Logg — who had already worked on Asteroids — bringing a sensibility that reportedly favored organic, garden-like visuals and less overtly violent, more approachable gameplay than much of what else was on arcade floors. She’s often credited with pushing for the game’s distinctive mushroom-patch aesthetic rather than a generic space backdrop.
An Unusually Broad Audience
Trade press coverage at the time noted something unusual about Centipede’s player base: it drew a notably higher percentage of female players than nearly any other arcade title of the era, at a moment when arcades skewed overwhelmingly toward teenage boys and young men. That reception reinforced the idea — still discussed in the industry today — that game design choices around pacing, aesthetics, and difficulty genuinely shape who feels invited to play, not just marketing.
Bailey’s Departure
Despite Centipede’s commercial success, Bailey left the game industry a few years later, citing the difficulty of being the only woman in a demanding, male-dominated engineering culture. She went on to an academic career, later teaching game design and writing about the industry’s gender dynamics — making her both a pioneering designer and an early, candid voice on why so few women followed her into arcade development during that period.
The Sequel and Legacy
- Millipede (1982) followed as a direct sequel, adding new enemies like beetles and inchworms while keeping the trackball control scheme.
- Centipede’s trackball hardware influenced other Atari titles, including Missile Command’s control scheme lineage.
- The game has been ported and re-released continuously since, from early home console adaptations through modern retro compilations, cited regularly as one of the best-designed games of the golden age.
Four decades on, Centipede remains a genuinely great trackball game — and a reminder that some of the arcade industry’s most enduring design ideas came from a designer the industry itself didn’t always know how to make room for.