Book’s Author: Richard Rouse III
Summarized by Samuel Coelho
3. Game Analysis: Centipede
By analysing arcade game’s traits, modern game designers can learn a lot about how they can make their own games more compelling experiences for players.
As with any media, the old arcade games that are remembered and talked about decades after their release tend to be the best ones, thus creating the false impression of a “gold age.” The bad arcade games have fallen between the cracks of history.
The thought, when creating an arcade game, was to get players to easily understand a game, so that by the end of their very first game they had a good sense of how the game worked and what was necessary for success. Also, the player’s game could not last very long, since any one player had only paid a quarter, and if the game only earned a single quarter in half hour, it would not be profitable enough to operate.
Features such as scoring and high-score tables served to increase the arcade game’s addictive nature and encourage players to keep spending money.
The technical restrictions of the day limited what games could do, and thereby influenced what the game could accomplish in terms of gameplay.
Often, a series of constraints forces artists to focus their creativity in a fashion that leads to better work than if they could do anything they wanted.
The gameplay variations that were designed for arcade games are far more radical than the tiny amount of variation one will find in modern games, which are more content to endlessly clone already-proven gaming genres.
3.1 Classic Arcade Game Traits
Single Screen Play: players, at any time, are able to see the entire game-world, and can make their decisions with a full knowledge of the state of that game-world. Empowering players with that kind of information seriously impacts the gameplay.
Infinite Play: constitutes an unwinnable game. A game like that makes every game a defeat for players. Having an unwinnable game also necessitates making a game that continuously becomes more challenging, hence a game design with a continuous, infinite ramping up of difficulty.
Multiple Lives: provides an adequate number of tries for novice players try to grasp the game’s mechanics before the game was over. The ability to earn extra lives provides another reward incentive for players and also sets up a game where dying once is not necessarily the end of the game, which in turn encourages players to take risks they might not otherwise.
Scoring/High Scores: with the scoring feature, players are able to acummulate points for accomplishing different objectives in the game, and the high-score table was introduced in order to allow players to enter their initials next to their score so players could point out their name in the high-score table to their friends as a way of proving their mettle.
Easy-to-Learn, Simple Gameplay: classic arcade games were easy for players to learn and impossible for players to master.Of course, simple does not always mean “limited” or “bad” gameplay; it can also “elegant” and “refined.”
No Story: the classic arcade game designers did not feel required to flesh out their game-worlds, to concoct explanations for why players were shooting at a given target or eating a certain type of dot, and the games did not suffer for it.
Centipede, though not a very complex game by today’s standards, have all of the different gameplay elements working together to create a uniquelly challenging game.
3.2 Input
One of the great advantages to working on a game for the arcades is beeing able to pick the best type of control for the game and provide players with that control system. The designer can then create the game around those controls, precisely balancing the game to work perfectly with that input method.
For many fans of Centipede, the excellent controller is one of the first things they could remember about the game. Centipede provides players with an analog control device in the form of a trackball. Aside from the trackball, the only other control players have is a button for firing the shooter's laser-type weapon. The game allows an infinitely fast rate of fire, but only one shot can be on the screen at a time. As the critters gets closer, players can kill the bugs more easily, but their chance of dying goes up. This keeps the game perfectly balanced, and requires players to plan their shots carefully, a design element that adds more depth to the game’s mechanics.
The player’s shooter can come up and down on a six-row vertival space in addition to moving sideways.
3.3 Interconnectedness
One of the great strenghts of Centipede is how well all the different elements of the gameplay fit together. Once the players have played the game just a few times, they have a completely reliable set of expectations about how these enemies will attack them.
- The centipede appears as either a lone twelve-segment centipede or as a shorter centipede accompanied by a number of single heads. It winds its way down from the top of the screen to the player’s area at the bottom, moving horizontally. Once at the bottom of the screen, the centipede moves back and forth inside the player’s area, posing a great danger to players.
- The spider moves in a diagonal, bouncing pattern across the bottom of the screen, passing in and out of the player’s area.
- The flea plummets vertically, straight down.
- The scorpion travels horizontally across the top half of the screen and hence can never collide with and kill players. But it poisons the mushrooms it passes under.
- Fighting against any of the creatures by itself would provide very little challenge for players. Yet, when they function together they combine to create uniquely challenging situations for players. With any one of these adversaries missing, the game’s challenge would be significantly diminished, if not removed altogether.
The insects also have a unique relationship to the mushrooms, which fill the game’s play-field.
- Every time a centipede bumps into a mushroom, it turns down to the next row below, as if it had run into the edge of the play-field. Each segment of the centipede destroyed leaves a mushroom where the segment was destroyed.
- As the flea falls to the bottom of the play-field, it leaves a trail of new mushrooms behind itself, and the only way for players to stop it is to kill it.
- The flea comes on to the playfield if less than a certain number of mushroom are on the bottom half of the screen.
- The spider eats mushrooms.
- The scorpion poisons the mushrooms. When the centipede hits a poisoned mushroom, it will move vertically straight down to the bottom of the screen.
Therefore, Centipede becomes something of a hybrid between an arcade shooter and a real-time puzzle game.
3.3 Escalating Tension
Centipede creates peaks and valleys in which tension escalates to an apex and, with the killing of the last centipede segment, relaxes for a moment as the game switches over the next wave.
The flea, the only enemy that must be shoot twice in order to be destroyed, also escalate tension over a few seconds. When it is shot just once, its speed increases dramatically and players must quickly shoot it again to avoid being hit.
If players shoot the middle segment of an eleven-segment centipede, it will split into two five-segment centipedes that head in opposite directions. As a result, skilled players will end up going for the head or tail of the centipede to avoid splitting it.
Over the course of a game of Centipede, mushrooms become more and more tightly packed on the play-field.
Centipede also balances its monsters to become harder and harder as player’s scores increase.
The game cycles around once twelve individual heads are spawned, and then becomes harder by only spawning fast centipedes.
The player’s death also provides a brief respite from the tension. When the player’s ship is destroyed, the wave starts over and hence the centipede returns to the top of the screen, and all of the mushrooms on the screen are reset.
Centipede is marvelous at creating and maintaining a tense situation for players, while still providing brief “breathing periods” within the action. Designers of modern games, who are always concerned with ramping up difficuly for players, could learn much by analysing how Centipede keeps players constantly on their toes without ever unfairly overwhelming them.
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