How to play Centipede online
- Move your wand: arrow keys. The real cartridge also works with the 5200 Trak-Ball; the emulator uses the joystick.
- Fire: Z (the lower buttons). Hold it down for continuous sparks.
- Number of players: the – key (the keypad’s * key) switches between one and two players
- Difficulty: the = key (the keypad’s # key) cycles through Easy, Standard and Hard play
- On-screen keypad: K, if you prefer to pick the keys with the joystick and Z
- Start: Enter
- Pause: P
- Full screen, Restart, save states: in the emulator’s toolbar (move the mouse over the screen)
Gameplay
You control a magic wand at the bottom of the screen. It slides left and right and a short way up, and it fires sparks straight up. The centipede enters at the top and crawls across the mushroom field, dropping one row every time it bumps into a mushroom or the edge. Each segment you hit turns into a mushroom, and the segment behind it becomes a new head, so a long centipede soon breaks into several short ones. A head is worth ten times as much as a body segment.
The centipede attacks in twelve waves, and three other creatures join in:
- Spider: bounces around the bottom of the field and eats mushrooms. The closer it is when you hit it, the more points it is worth.
- Flea: drops straight down and plants mushrooms once most of the mushrooms near you are gone. It takes two hits, and the first one makes it fall faster.
- Scorpion: appears from the third wave and poisons every mushroom it touches. A centipede that touches a poisoned mushroom goes wild and dives straight down at you.
You start with three wands and lose one whenever the centipede, the spider or the flea bites you. Every 12,000 points earns a bonus wand, up to six at a time, and the game ends when the last one is gone.
Game options
Before you press Start, the keypad lets you choose a one- or two-player game and one of three settings: Easy play for beginners and children, Standard for intermediate players and Hard for experts.
Tips
- Shoot a vertical lane. Clear a narrow column through the mushrooms and the centipede drops through it quickly, right into your line of fire.
- Don’t clear everything near you. The flea only arrives when the area above your wand is nearly empty of mushrooms.
- Hit the spider close up. It is worth the most when it is nearly on top of you, so hold your nerve rather than chasing it.
The story behind Centipede on the 5200
The arcade Centipede came out in August 1981. Ed Logg designed it and Dona Bailey did about half of the programming, and it became one of the first arcade games with a large female audience. Atari brought it to all of its home machines: the Atari 8-bit computer version by Dave Getreu came in 1982, and the Atari 2600 cartridge, released in March 1983, sold almost 1.5 million copies.
The 5200 version was written by Frank Hausman and Sean Hennessy. Its final code is dated August 1982, before the console launched, and Wikipedia lists the release as February 1983. The 5200 game looks much more like the arcade machine than the computer version, and it was one of the cartridges that supported the 5200 Trak-Ball controller. Reviewers at the time called it a faithful conversion, and David Ahl of Creative Computing described it as delightful fun.
