8 games similar to Centipede — handpicked for fans of Action and Shooter games.
Centipede’s genius lies in its elegant tension: a fixed-screen shooter where the battlefield itself becomes your enemy, as mushrooms accumulate and funnel that relentless segmented menace ever closer to your shooter. If you love the rhythm of clearing waves, chasing high scores, and mastering the particular geometry of each arcade classic, these picks deliver the same electric loop of danger, reaction, and reward. These are games built for players who find deep satisfaction in a few minutes of pure, focused arcade action.
Atari 2600 | 1980 Space Invaders is the closest spiritual sibling Centipede has — a fixed-screen shooter where you control a lone cannon at the bottom of the screen, blasting upward at descending rows of enemies. Like Centipede, the pressure builds methodically: the invaders slow when there are fewer of them, but that eerie speed-up as their numbers dwindle creates one of the most nerve-wracking moments in all of gaming. The defensive bunkers add a terrain element similar to Centipede’s mushroom field, eroding under fire until they offer no protection at all. If the core loop of Centipede — measure, aim, survive — is what draws you in, Space Invaders is essential, and the Atari 2600 port is a fine place to experience one of the medium’s defining works.
Arcade / NES | 1981 Galaga elevates the fixed-shooter formula with enemy formations that swoop and dive in memorized patterns, rewarding players who learn the choreography and punishing those who don’t. Where Centipede bombards you with a chaotic organism threading through mushroom mazes, Galaga sends its insectoid attackers in precise, scripted arcs — and one of the most celebrated mechanics in arcade history lets an enemy capture your fighter, only for you to rescue it and fly as a twin-ship powerhouse. The bonus challenge stages, where you shoot at formations without taking damage, scratch exactly the same itch as Centipede’s spider-dodging rhythm. Mastering Galaga’s attack waves feels deeply similar to learning Centipede’s segmented approach: pattern recognition rewarded with survival.
Atari 2600 | 1980 Missile Command swaps the offensive aggression of Centipede for an agonizing defensive scramble, but the psychological pressure is identical — waves of threats cascade down the screen, and your job is to intercept as many as possible before your cities are gone. Both games share a creeping dread as enemies multiply and your options shrink; in Centipede it’s the mushroom field closing in, in Missile Command it’s the widening barrage that no human reflex can fully outpace. The game rewards smart resource allocation — you have three missile batteries with limited ammo — in the same way Centipede rewards smart mushroom management. It’s a game you cannot win, only survive longer, and that philosophical edge gives it the same haunting replay quality that keeps Centipede players punching in one more quarter.
Atari 2600 | 1979 Asteroids shares Centipede’s DNA in the way it turns the playfield into an active threat: shooting a large asteroid doesn’t eliminate the danger, it multiplies it into smaller, faster fragments that fill the screen. Like the mushroom field in Centipede, the debris you create shapes the difficulty of the situation you’re in moments later. The ship’s rotation-based movement is a sharp contrast to Centipede’s horizontal shooter, but the underlying challenge — managing a screen full of hazards you’ve partially created — is the same satisfying puzzle. The flying saucers that appear and home in on you fill exactly the same role as Centipede’s spiders: sudden, fast, lethal interruptions that punish complacency.
Arcade / Atari 2600 | 1982 Dig Dug might seem like the odd one out, but its core tension maps perfectly onto Centipede’s: you’re navigating a space where the terrain and the enemies are inseparable, and every action you take reshapes the battlefield. Just as Centipede’s mushroom field forces you to think geometrically about enemy approach paths, Dig Dug’s underground tunnels are carved by your movement, and rocks can be manipulated to crush clustered enemies — if you’re willing to take the risk. The enemies (Pookas and Fygars) pursue you relentlessly through the maze you’ve dug, which creates the same creeping siege feeling that makes Centipede so compelling. Dig Dug rewards players who think a move ahead, not just those with fast reflexes, and that strategic dimension gives it the same depth beneath its simple surface.
Arcade | 1981 Tempest is Atari’s most sophisticated take on the tube shooter, placing you on the rim of a geometric well — a star, a circle, a claw shape — and sending enemies crawling up from the depths toward your position. Like Centipede, Tempest is about reading threat vectors and eliminating enemies before they reach your line, and the different well shapes rotate through Centipede-like intensity increases that keep experienced players perpetually challenged. The Superzapper, a screen-clearing bomb with limited uses, echoes the desperate moments in Centipede when a centipede head dips past your barrier and you need an immediate answer. Tempest’s vector graphics give it a cold, mathematical beauty that’s unique in the arcade era, but underneath it’s built on the same geometry-of-survival foundation that makes Centipede timeless.
Arcade | 1982 Robotron: 2084 takes the arcade shooter’s intensity to its absolute limit: you control a character who can move and shoot independently in eight directions, surrounded on all sides by relentless robots, with human survivors to rescue amid the chaos. Where Centipede confines the threat to a single approaching organism, Robotron fills the entire screen simultaneously — it’s Centipede’s tension extrapolated to every direction at once, a white-knuckle sprint from the first second to the last. The dual-joystick control scheme (one to move, one to aim) was revolutionary, and the game demands the same type of split-attention spatial awareness that Centipede cultivates in its players. If Centipede feels manageable, Robotron is where that mastery goes to be tested to destruction.
TurboGrafx-16 | 1989 Blazing Lazers represents what the fixed-shooter tradition grew into by the end of the decade: a vertically scrolling shoot-em-up with layered weapon systems, enormous boss encounters, and a difficulty curve that demands the same commitment to pattern mastery that Centipede pioneered. The game’s weapon pods can be combined to create different attack configurations, giving skilled players the same kind of battlefield customization that Centipede fans develop through strategic mushroom preservation. While it’s far removed from the single-screen simplicity of 1980, the DNA is unmistakable — constant threat from above, limited movement space, and a scoring system that rewards aggressive play over passive survival. For Centipede fans curious about where the genre went after the golden age, Blazing Lazers is one of the finest destinations.
The common thread running through every one of these recommendations is what game designers call emergent threat — the idea that the danger isn’t fixed and static but grows and transforms as the game progresses. Centipede’s mushroom field is the purest expression of this: every flea that drops, every scorpion that poisons a row, every centipede segment that dies and becomes a mushroom is a change to the battlefield that you have to account for in the next breath. Space Invaders does this with bunker erosion, Asteroids does it with asteroid fragmentation, Dig Dug does it with tunnel networks. These aren’t games where you memorize a fixed pattern and execute it — they’re games where you manage an evolving system under time pressure.
The second unifying quality is the high-score loop, which is fundamentally different from a progression system. There’s no unlocking, no leveling up, no story beat to chase. The reward is a number, and the meaning of that number comes entirely from what you know it represents — how long you survived, how efficiently you cleared waves, how elegantly you navigated the trap the game set for you. This was the dominant design philosophy of the early arcade era, and it produces a particular kind of player engagement that modern games rarely replicate: total presence, because distraction means death, and death is immediate and cheap enough to invite one more try.
These games also share a relationship with geometric thinking that sets them apart from action games in the broader sense. Centipede players learn to read the mushroom field as a map of upcoming danger — a dense cluster on the left means the centipede will be forced right, which means the flea will likely drop in a particular corridor. Space Invaders players learn to shoot the leftmost column first to slow the enemy descent. Tempest players learn which well shapes favor aggressive play versus cautious positioning. This spatial reasoning under pressure is the skill that transfers across all of these titles, and it’s why players who love one often find the others immediately rewarding.
Finally, every game on this list respects the player’s time in a way that modern open-world games rarely do. A session can be three minutes or thirty, and both are complete experiences. The loop is tight: start, escalate, die, reflect, repeat. This compulsive brevity is what made the arcade format so powerful, and it’s what keeps these games playable today — they don’t ask you to remember where you left off, they just ask if you can do a little better than last time.
If you’re a dedicated Centipede fan exploring these recommendations for the first time, start with Space Invaders and Galaga — they’re the most direct translations of the same skill set. The pattern-reading and threat-prioritization you’ve built playing Centipede will kick in almost immediately, and you’ll find yourself climbing the score tables faster than casual players who’ve never developed that arcade instinct. From there, Missile Command and Dig Dug offer meaningful variations that will challenge different muscles: Missile Command punishes greedy play and rewards triage decisions, while Dig Dug rewards premeditation over reaction.
Once you’ve worked through those four, Asteroids and Tempest represent a genuine difficulty step up — Asteroids because the movement physics demand a complete re-learning of spatial control, and Tempest because its abstract geometry can be disorienting before it clicks. Robotron: 2084 should be saved for last. It’s the game that takes everything the arcade shooter tradition built and cranks it to an intensity that’s almost cruel. Don’t be discouraged by single-digit survival times when you first sit down with it — every Robotron veteran has a story about the session when everything suddenly made sense, and the game transformed from chaos into something almost beautiful. That breakthrough moment is exactly what Centipede promised with its very first quarter.
| Feature | Platform | Year | Score | Genre |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Space Invaders | ATARI-2600 | 1980 | 8.3 | Shoot 'em Up, Arcade |
| Galaga | ATARI-2600 | 1981 | 8.8 | Arcade, Shooter |
| Missile Command | ATARI-2600 | 1980 | 8.2 | Action, Shooter |
| Asteroids | ATARI-2600 | 1981 | 8.2 | Shoot 'em Up, Arcade |
| Dig Dug | ATARI-2600 | 1982 | 8.3 | Action, Puzzle |
| Tempest | ATARI-2600 | 1981 | 8.4 | Shooter, Action |
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The landmark 1980 Atari 2600 port of Taito's legendary arcade game became the console's first killer app and sold over 2 million copies. Space Invaders on 2600 added numerous game variations not in the original arcade, making it a more feature-rich experience than the game that single-handedly popularized video gaming.
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Atari's Cold War anxiety made playable. Missile Command puts players in command of three anti-missile batteries defending six cities from an unrelenting rain of ballistic missiles. Stress escalates until cities fall and the screen reads THE END — a stark reminder that there is no victory, only delay.
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The home conversion of Atari's legendary 1979 arcade game, bringing the iconic asteroid-blasting experience to living rooms everywhere. A faithful adaptation of one of the most important arcade games ever made, Asteroids on Atari 2600 became one of the platform's best-selling titles.
Namco's 1982 arcade classic where a gardener digs through underground tunnels, inflates enemy Pookas and Fygar dragons with an air pump until they pop, or crushes them with falling rocks. One of the most charming and cleverly designed arcade games of the golden age.
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Dave Theurer's 1981 Atari arcade game placed players on the rim of a geometric tube, shooting enemies climbing toward them from the depths. Tempest's vector graphics, tube-based 3D perspective, and relentless enemy escalation created a distinctive and influential shooter that defined Atari's technical ambition.
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Williams Electronics' 1982 twin-stick arcade masterpiece is the defining twin-stick shooter and the direct ancestor of games from Smash TV to Geometry Wars. Move and shoot independently in all directions while rescuing humans and surviving an overwhelming robot army. Pure, distilled action gaming.
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The vertical shoot-em-up that launched alongside the TurboGrafx-16 and immediately established the console's technical credentials — Blazing Lazers' deep weapon upgrade tree, relentless screen-filling enemy patterns, and smooth scrolling demonstrated hardware capabilities that the competition struggled to match. Compile's design philosophy of escalating chaos rewarded players willing to master the upgrade system, and the game set the standard for the genre on home hardware that many subsequent shooters aspired to but few equaled.