There’s A Connection Between GM And The Classic Arcade Game Centipede: Cold Start

The Atari video game Centipede, Atari’s second-most popular coin-operated arcade game right after Asteroids, is an icon of video gaming. With its novel but familiar gameplay, vivid and unexpected color palette, and track-ball controller, there was nothing like it when it came out in 1981. And, incredibly, there’s a direct relationship between Centipede and GM.

Yes, GM! Huge, stogy old GM, makers of Oldsmobiles and Buicks, has a link to this new and novel world of video games, thanks to one person. Centipede was programmed, at least in part, by a programmer named Dona Bailey, a woman who learned her considerable programming chops while working at GM.

Bailey was programming computer climate control systems and engine control computers and more sophisticated computer interface systems, all using hardcore assembly code. I can’t completely confirm this, but her work likely contributed to Cadillac computer systems like this one, enjoyed by lemonade-and-ice-tea-mixing hero, Arnold Palmer:

I know now it’s hard to think of Arnold Palmer for anything but some recent comments about his pants-bound anatomy, but there was once a time where he also appreciated a good car-computer.

Meanwhile, Bailey heard a Pretenders song called “Space Invader,” and started to wonder what the hell it was talking about.

A friend took her to a bar, where she first encountered the song’s inspiration, the video game Space Invaders, and while Bailey wasn’t too impressed with the game, she found it relatable and understandable, especially in the context of the systems she’d been working with at GM.

She soon decided that video games were more exciting to work on than car control computer systems, and found that Atari was a leader in the industry, so she moved to California and resolved to get a job there.

Fortunately for her, Atari made much use of the 6502 microprocessor, which is what Bailey had learned to program while at GM. Anyone who knew how to program 6502 assembly code back in the late 1970s was a valuable commodity for Atari, so Bailey was hired, becoming the first and only woman to work at Atari’s coin-op division.

Instructed to look in a big three-ring binder of game ideas for a project to work on, Bailey skipped past the innumerable something in space shoots lasers (spelled “lazers” in all of the documents in the binder, which baffled her) and settled on a one-sentence description to pursue:  “A multi segmented insect crawls on to the screen and is shot by the player.”

That became the larva that grew into the full insect that was Centipede, which Bailey worked on along with Atari legend Ed Logg.

There you go; one of the key people behind one of the true icons in early video games got her start programming 6502 CPUs for use in GM engines and cars. Without GM’s training, it’s possible Bailey would never have gone to Atari, and this game would not exist.

What an unexpected connection, right?

Bailey has written a screenplay about those early days at Atari, and I hope it gets picked up by someone, because I’d be really curious to see that.