One of Atari’s earliest hits was the classic trackball arcade game Centipede. Centipede begat Millipede, and Millipede begat… not much of anything. The license lay dormant for well over a decade before Hasbro put out an updated and all-but-forgotten new game on PC/Dreamcast/PS1, and there was a 3DS/Wii game from 2011, but like other once-great series from the early 80s Centipede is remembered as a relic of videogaming’s earliest years. If there’s one thing that’s beenmade clear recently, though, it’s that the passage of decades doesn’t mean a series is dead. Centipede has almost returned, ready to crawl across the screen again thanks to Atari’s upcoming Centipede: Recharged.
Much like Llamasoft’s run on Tempest, Centipede: Recharged isn’t trying to reinvent the game but rather polish it up a bit and deliver the same rush of arcade excitement as the original, but prettier and with far more action on the screen than the old arcade hardware could ever hope to handle. The little player ship scoots around the bottom third of the screen trying to keep it clear of the mushrooms, only able to fire a single shot at a time but with the spiders now helpfully dropping powerups. The basic gameplay of shoot/survive is intact, although the playfield comes with some new obstacles like unbreakable rocks, but the major change is obvious in the video below with the switch to vector-style graphics instead of Centipede/Millipede’s sprites. On the one hand it feels a bit “look at me, I’m inaccurately old!” but on the other everything shatters into glowing neon lines in massive explosions, so on the whole it feels like a win. The thirty seconds of trailer also features a thumping Tempest-style techno soundtrack, with the full tuneavailable hereif you want to jam out to it.
Centipede: Recharged is the first in Atari’s upcoming “premium gaming initiative”, taking the classic licenses and updating them for modern hardware, and it’s looking to be off to a promising start. The game is coming out September 29 for Xboxes One and Series X/S, Playstations 4 and 5, PC, and of course the Atari VCS. The trailer below is short, punchy, and 30 seconds of lights and music, so give it a watch to see how Centipede: Recharged balances its classic gameplay and shiny new presentation.
