You’d be excused for thinking I’m dead, but not yet – just busy. The year of 2021 was a wild one, filled with a lot of extra work. I’m kind of exhausted, truth be told, and while I have ideas for posts I’ve lacked the energy and motivation to put them out there.
But tonight…tonight, I saw something that I couldn’t pass by. You see, I keep telling my wife that I’m old. There’s more than a decade between us. Truth is, I don’t look my age – I look younger. No one can tell that there’s this big age gap between us, and to be honest…I’m in middle age – I’m not old yet.
However: tonight I went looking for the Atari game Centipede to see what year it had been released. I had this game on the family’s old VIC-20 computer back in the mid-1980s. We bought it used for $30 around 1985 and then went to Toys R Us, where we found a bunch of games for it floating around for $2 – on clearance. The place I grew up in was still becoming suburban and was a bit more rural, and I remember these VIC-20 games sitting beside a Nintendo display with Robbie the Robot – the video game crash hadn’t yet rebounded.
So because of my personal history with Centipede, I have the arcade marquee as a desktop background. She mentioned that the font and art style looked very 1970s, and I went to see if it was indeed one of the few games released in the late 1970s or if it was more in the 1980 – 1981 years when arcades were at their peak. But lo and behold…where do I find the Centipede arcade game available to play as a browser game online?
It’s on the website of the AARP, along with a few other Atari games:
Yeah…if I wasn’t really old before, I definitely am now.