Gamasutra is offering an interesting interview with Dona Bailey, the creator of the original Centipede, a classic game which has inspired thousands of imitations over the years. In the interview Bailey discusses her experiences as the only female game designer in the industry at the time, what it was like to work at Atari, and the present and future status of women in the business.

Did things change once you’d done Centipede?
Yes, but I’m not sure it was for the better! There was a lot of surly attention after that. It’s not always popular to do something [like] that -- the first thing that happened, I was not ready for at all, and I still haven’t figured out how to deal with this part -- people just started, y’know... the typical kind of thing that people would say was, either it was a fluke or I didn’t really do it, somebody else did it. I’m a very peaceful person, and I felt sick of fighting, so I really just disappeared, and I haven’t had contact with the industry for at least twenty years.

Do you follow the industry at all, now?
I didn’t at all until about a year ago. I teach now, and I taught a special class for some very accelerated students who were the first ones accepted into the new game design program at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. They’d had all AP classes, and when I met them, I found out that they had all kinds of certifications, all kinds of things I didn’t expect, and they were very accelerated for the typical students who I teach. And so I was really glad I’d spent the summer doing a lot of preparation so I was up on all the game genres, and spent a lot of time reading Game Developer and all kinds of things. So through reading, that’s my biggest connection.
It’s interesting -- one of the first things I realized was that Centipede would be considered, at best, a “casual game” now -- which was so funny to me, because it wasn’t that at all -- it was an action game with a story, and now it really doesn’t have a narrative at all by today’s standards! It probably wouldn’t even be released today. All of those things were interesting to me when I was going through this period of discovery.

Gamasutra: The Original Gaming Bug

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