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Arcade & Classic Games · 11

Centipede, released in 1981, used a trackball and was co-designed by Dona Bailey, one of the relatively few women designing major arcade games at the time. The design side has its own twist: Simple controls age well because new players can discover the entire input vocabulary in seconds, leaving the interesting part—timing and decisions—to carry the challenge. Arcade difficulty rises gently until the game remembers it was built to eat coins.

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A little game-room trivia

The attract mode on an arcade machine exists to sell the game while nobody is playing. Flashing demos, high scores and sound effects were basically tiny animated advertisements built into the cabinet. The category has another odd corner too: Many classic games speed up as the player succeeds. Sometimes that was deliberate design, and sometimes hardware behavior helped create it; either way, difficulty rising with competence became an arcade tradition.