Components: Shooter, centipede, mushrooms to change
up centipede movement, fleas and spiders to increase
difficulty.
Skills required / taught: Aim, quickness, avoidance
Object: The player defends himself from a descending centipede
by shooting from the bottom of the screen as it winds its way through mushrooms.


About the Game
As the first vertical oriented shooting game to become popular in the arcade world, Centipede was followed by Millipede and Super Centipede. The game was adapted for several home systems and was even the bases for a board game developed by Milton Bradley in 1983.


How it Works
As the threatening Centipede winds its way down to the shooter at the bottom of the screen, it encounters “mushrooms” that cause it to drop one level and change direction. This causes the Centipede to move closer to the shooter. The player shoots at the Centipede killing parts of it as it descends, but it also can cause it to separate and become two individual Centipedes. Fleas and Spiders come along and cause more problems for the player. The game is won by successfully shooting all parts of the Centipede before it gets to the shooter. The player’s life is lost by allowing the Centipede to get all the way down the screen and touch the shooter.
A vertical oriented shooting game is a different way to go about this successful genre of play. Moving left to right along the bottom eliminates some of the some of the difficulty of aiming. Finding a force to fall from the top of a screen or even from one side to the other with your shooter on the opposite side can be found just thinking through everyday pop culture or an era of the past.


Thought Bubble
A new game’s falling character could be an evil antagonist or something of a friendly design that has to be “caught” at the bottom. The side to side could be an aerial view of something approaching the shooter on the opposite side.

Whatever naturally goes with the character can be the catalyst that makes it speed up or break apart or cause problems for the shooter/catcher/etc.

You could choose to have the shooter/catcher/etc. be able to gain more qualities to give it amped-up powers.

Using several characters popular to different sectors of society to create sub-games within the new game would make it appeal to several different markets