Atari Centipede

Enjoy Playing Atari Centipede

Imagine stepping up to that glowing arcade cabinet back in the day, quarters jingling in your pocket and the neon lights reflecting off the screen. You’d grip the trackball and watch as a centipede made its way down through a field of mushrooms, each mushroom popping into being as you shot at it with your little bug blaster. It’s one of those games that feels simple on the surface—you move left and right, you fire upwards—but there’s a constant buzz of strategy in deciding which mushrooms to clear and how to keep that centipede from reaching your base.

As the centipede splits and dodges through the forest of mushrooms, you learn pretty quickly that timing is everything. Shoot the head and watch the body turn into multiple faster pieces, or take out bits of the mushroom trail and force the centipede to reroute. Add a couple of spiders skittering across the screen, fleas tumbling downward, and scorpions poisoning the ground, and suddenly you’re juggling a dozen tiny threats all vying for a quick game over. It’s fast, it’s frantic, and every moment feels like a little puzzle.

Once you’ve mastered the basics, the real fun comes from those gapless moments when you clear a vertical column of mushrooms and face wave after wave of straight-down centipede segments. You learn little tricks—like blasting full columns to get faster drop speed or cornering spiders to pick off bonus points. And despite the growing velocity of all these creepy-crawlies, there’s this satisfying rhythm that kicks in, a back-and-forth dance between you and the onslaught.

Even now, decades later, Centipede holds up as one of those timeless classics. It’s not just about competing for the top score on the cabinet sticker—it’s about the thrill of that first perfect run, the way your pulse quickens when the final segments rush toward you, and the simple joy of an endlessly looping challenge. For anyone craving a taste of old-school arcade magic, it still delivers that sweet, addictive buzz.