Centipedeis a fast-action shooting game involving a variety of adversar-
ies that the player must kill in order to avoid being killed by them. The ene-
mies move in completely predictable, predetermined patterns, but the
combination of the movement of these creatures and other objects in the
game-world creates a challenging experience for the player. The player can
attempt to change the game-world to make the adversaries’ movements less
threatening, and the player can see the entire game-world at once. The
game continues until the player dies a specific number of times, with
points accumulating to represent how well the player did in that particular
game; there is no winning or finishingCentipede.That focus is probably too long and too detailed to be a proper game focus, but it is hard
for me to read Ed Logg’s mind to know what his core concerns were when makingCen-
tipede. So I have included all of the crucial parts of the game I can find. Of course, the
focus he used may bear no relationship at all to the one above, if he used a focus at all.
When development ofCentipede 3Dinitially got under way, the idea was to take
only the most basic characters ofCentipede— the player’s shooter ship, the centipedes,
spiders, fleas, and mushrooms — and have them interact in a 3D world. The decision to
move the game to 3D was already a foregone conclusion when we started working on
the project. It was a choice whose appropriateness was certainly debatable given the
fundamental mechanics of the original. Indeed, from conception through the earliest
versions of the game, not much attention was paid to the game mechanics and behav-
iors of the original. The elements from the originalCentipedewere being used more for
aesthetics than anything else. When our initial game prototype turned out not to be
very fun, we decided to try to emulate more of the original game’s gameplay in the new
3D version, wherever possible imitating and updating whatever the 1981Centipededid
in a 3D, level-based world. As we started pursuing our new focus, we found that the
more we emulated the classic, the more fun the new game became. Though it was not
written down at the time, you could say our focus was along the lines of the following:
Chapter 5: Focus 81
The focus of the 3D
version ofCentipedewas
to create a game that
captured the arcade
game-play of the
originalCentipedein a
three-dimensional,
level-based
environment.