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The idea of Asteroids was originally conceived by Lyle Raines who was Atari’s vice president of engineering in 1979. Ed Logg, eventually took the lead on the project and is credited with it’s programming.

The game’s concept is simple: Shoot the large asteroids and break them into smaller asteroids. Then shoot those asteroids into even smaller asteroids. The smaller the size of the rocks, the faster they move. This asteroid field puts the player in an ever-increasing danger zone of flying debris. The UFO’s were added to spice things up and keep the player from just sitting there avoiding the asteroids.

Asteroids was designed on the same hardware as another of Atari’s classics: Lunar Lander. Both games used the high resolution, black and white vector-scan screens (in which the graphics are composed of lines drawn on a vector monitor). Yet Lunar Lander never became the world-wide phenomena that Asteroids did. Asteroids was so popular when it was released, it replaced Space Invaders as the king of the arcades and gave Atari enough cash to be financially independent from Warner.

“Senior engineer Steve Calfee reflected that Asteroids appeals to some low, primitive drive in the human mind to clean and take control of the environment. Blasting asteroids into rubble until a once-crowded screen turned into a neat black field appealed to people whose lives were nothing but a field of chaos. For them, Asteroids became a metaphor for life.” – Paul Schuytema, Microsoft Arcade, The Official Strategy Guide.

Centipede © 1981 Atari.
Designed by Dona Bailey and Ed Logg, it was one of the most commercially successful games from the golden age of arcade video games and one of the first with a significant female player base.

Centipede is a vertically oriented single screen shoot-em-up in which the aim is to use the ‘Bug Blaster’ to shoot the centipedes that snake down towards the bottom of the screen to amass as high a score as possible.

The play-field is littered with randomly placed mushrooms and the rapidly descending Centipede changes direction when it runs into a mushroom. When a segment of the Centipede is shot, the segment is destroyed and a mushroom appears in its place, the Centipede then breaks into two smaller centipedes, each with its own head, and continues its descent.

Players can move the Bug Blaster vertically as well as horizontally, although only for the lower fifth of the play-field. Mushrooms can also be shot for points and to clear blocked areas. Once a Centipede reaches the bottom of the screen, it starts snaking back up, but remains within the lower section of the play-field near the player’s Bug Blaster.

Additionally, any Centipede that reaches the very bottom of the screen without being shot releases its tail section which then becomes a new head. Other new heads also enter the screen from the bottom corners of the play-field as time progresses.

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