Arcade & Classic Games · 82

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. Another angle makes it more interesting: 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. The safest pattern works perfectly until the game becomes fast enough to expose that it was never safe.