Centipede: Infestation – Atari talks story, development, garden gnomes, and I ask about their next console
Side Note: The conference thing is tonight, so this may just get buried in the fray. I’ll just repost later, but I wanted to make sure it got up before Tuesday! Since I have more junk to post this week…
When most people hear the word “Reimagining”, they think of the failed attempts at bringing back franchises like Pac-Man, Frogger, Tomb Raider, and Sonic the Hedgehog over and over and over again, each time getting slightly excited at the prospect of having these games return to their glory days, and each time getting disappointed because, let be honest, they almost never do. Needless to say, when I went to play Atari’s upcoming Centipede: Infestation, I had pretty much made up my mind about the game and assumed I could’ve written my hands-on impressions in a split second with my eyes closed while I was asleep.
It would have gone something like this.
So when I got to the booth and my tour guide (weirdly also named “Austin”- I think Atari had been watching me sleep) brought me to the Wii version of Infestation, I put a smile on my face and braced myself for the worst. And of course, the one time I go to E3 and get to play a game like this, it actually isn’t all that shitty. Go figure.
Fast forward a few months and I find myself doing my first non-email interview with someone (this time over Skype!) with a wonderful guy over at Atari named Jonathan Moses, with whom I was set to talk all about this upcoming game. Of course, since I have the attention span of a rat, we ended up talking not only about Infestation, but about garden gnomes, development cycles, 3DS difficulties, and when we’d see Atari’s next home console. Though, we didn’t so much “talk” about a new console as “very briefly touch on it”, but I probably shouldn’t say more and just use that as a way to get people to read this unfairly.
I’m not a real journalist; I can do stuff like that.
We sat down in our virtual room (which was probably just him being all comfortable in his house, and me being all comfortable in mine) and I kicked things off right away by asking him a totally curveball, killer question that I knew would throw him off.
“I’m here talking with a mister Jonathan Moses from Atari. Is that correct?”
“That’s correct!” he answered, and I knew I had met my interviewing match. It was like Rocky vs. that other guy from Rocky, only it was two nerds talking through a computer, which is much more intense.
So I jumped right into something that had been bugging me since I played the game at E3 and experienced those initial negative preconceptions: Was this negative image of re-imaginings hurting their press?
“Well, you know I think your comment’s very fair.” he said, “There have been a lot of remakes of a lot of different video games through time and they range from just sort of re-skins of the same game to something that’s not recognizable as the original at all.
“And I think with Centipede we really started this from the beginning of, you know, if we took sort of the core DNA of what Centipede was- you know, fun arcade game shooting bugs and the idea of how you shoot the bugs and it turns into the mushrooms- what can we take from that and not re-skin it, but really take it and make a game from the ground up for today’s gamer.”
And it’s fair to say that, from what I’ve played, they’ve done a really good job of that so far. The game has two versions- one for Wii and one for 3DS- and they’re more or less identical. If they renamed it something like “Attack of the Large Bugs”, you probably wouldn’t be able to guess that it was Centipede upon first glance. After playing it, however, you would more than likely begin to realize its influences. It’s still hectic, it’s still fast-paced, and there are still a lot of bugs. None of those annoying spiders though.
Seriously. F*ck those guys.
Another thing that a lot of people will be happy to hear is that the game isn’t developed by some weird no-name division of Atari that just pumps these games out like Willy Wonka pumps out really weird jokes and Oompa Loompas. And candy. No, this game is developed by a totally different developer whom many people have a lot of respect for: WayForward.
“A fantastic team to work with.” said Moses, “They have a huge pedigree on Nintendo platforms and I’ve been a big fan of their games for a long time.
The original idea- sort of talking with WayForward about this- goes back a couple of years. It started with a call to a bunch of different developers with [the Centipede] IP and asking them what they would do with it, and WayForward came up with this idea, and it’s been about trying to come up with really timing for them, and timing for us. And I would say development in the actual nuts and bolts of development have been for just about a year. A little over a year.”
It was time for me to get back into crushing interviewer mode and squeeze him for all the secret information I could.
“If I can ask, what other developers did you bring the idea to?”
“Uh, well so… Uh. [Laughs] I’m not gonna tell you any of them.”
Curses, Jonathan Moses! He was onto me at this point, and I wasn’t sure I could outsmart him with my harsh and biting questions.
“-but there were several of them we had. And the ideas raised the gambit from a re-skinning of centipede- which, reading the pitch, it was totally kick-ass; the art was beautiful- but I think the WayForward pitch resonated with us because- especially in its… it was quirky, it had a great story, and it had a whole back story to the way centipede worked, and the reason the universe got to be the way it was we just fell in love with.”
The story of Centipede: Infestation is certainly more substantial than the original story (which was centered around a garden gnome who fights bugs), and it centers around a boy named Max who lives in this post-apocalyptic world brought on by Missile Command letting one through (Get it? Missile Command?) and the whole world blowing itself up. As any good nuclear war researcher knows, things get mutated, and animals get especially large in settings like this. Bugs not withstanding.
“Missile Command let one through, the world has been irradiated, bugs are growing, the people who are left are living in these basically bunkers- we don’t see any of the other survivors, but we do know that there’s Max who’s chosen to live out in the wasteland rather than be with people, and part of that is because of what happened to his family right after the war- or right after the attack- and you learn more of that through the story. And so he’s basically living out in the wasteland and sees himself as Max the Bugslayer who kills the bugs to help people, and because what else are you going to do living out in the wasteland?”
That’s not all though. Like any good story, our young hero meets a young girl and (clearly) falls madly in love with her. There’s a problem though- Max is a bug slaughterer, and the girl, Maisy, doesn’t want to kill the bugs and instead grows flowers to save the world from the apocalypse, which- apparently- is pretty effective.
“She has this ability to grow gardens in what was the wasteland, and where her gardens are, there’s oxygen so people are able to live without gas masks and outside of their bunkers. Max meets her and is really taken by how different she is from the other people he’s met, and takes it upon himself to protect her from the bugs. From his perspective he’s protecting her, but from her perspective he’s a bug magnet.”
Considering the name of the game, I'm guessing she's right.
But aside from the story, why should we play this game? Well, it’s a solid game in its own right- it’s not the next Zelda, but it’s a fun romp through a good story with some fun gameplay- and it also has something that makes it legitimately a fantastic party game. I recently wrote an article about games that will make you scream at your friends and laugh at misfortune, and this is one of those games because it includes a full co-op mode. For the genre its in and the thing that it’s aiming to do, it really is about as good as it gets.
For a few other features, Atari will be using StreetPass and SpotPass on the 3DS, but my vote is going to have to go for the Wii version simply because it controls a lot better and will be easier to get friends together to play co-op.
You can look for Centipede: Infestation to hit store shelves “Fall 2011” (apparently I wasn’t skillful enough in my words to even get a specific release date for a game that’s coming out in the next three months) both on Wii and on 3DS!
Check out the full interview here (it’s about 20 minutes) where we talk about garden gnomes, the original game, laugh a lot more, and I ask him when we can expect Atari’s next console. Enjoy!
