NOTE: This interview was conducted prior to the game’s launch.

"The original game had a great gameplay foundation where the player falls down a cavern, dodging and weaving between the terrain and enemy shots. We wanted to improve on that – we pulled back the camera so that the player could see more of their path, increased the fall speed, and gave the player the ability not only to shoot the enemies but to shoot through the terrain as well."

What prompted the decision to go back to Caverns of Mars for a modern release?

Tadas Migauskas (Game Designer and Producer): We were exploring the Atari games catalog for some time. Our team that’s working on the Recharged series are much younger and don’t have that first hand experience with most of the Atari Classics so all of them were looking quite enticing. When we saw Caverns of Mars it brought us back to the games we used to play when we were younger (eg.: the old flash game Motherload or the more recent Downwell). We were immediately drawn to Caverns of Mars because it gave off a sense of exploration of the deep unknown caverns and (spoiler alert) finding an underground city at the end. It also had a great gameplay foundation where we knew with some improvement we could have a great game.

Given the fact that the original game is over four decades old, how did you decide how much of the gameplay needed fixes and improvements and how much of it could be brought over without any major reworks?

Migauskas: As I mentioned before the original game had a great gameplay foundation where the player falls down a cavern, dodging and weaving between the terrain and enemy shots. We wanted to improve on that – we pulled back the camera so that the player could see more of their path, increased the fall speed, and gave the player the ability not only to shoot the enemies but to shoot through the terrain as well. This allowed us to create more enclosed environments forcing the player to blast their way through. We also added a feature where the player drastically slows down when shooting, helping them navigate. What we brought back from the original was the fuel that the player needs to manage, some sections of the cavern were modeled from the original game, we also tried to respect the ending where the player reaches the city inside of the cavern and tried to make it more impactful.

From a visuals perspective, Caverns of Mars: Recharged sports quite a different look from the original. How did you land on the game’s new look?

Migauskas: In the pre-production stage, we were exploring ideas about how much content we will have. We wanted to have 3 distinct stages in the game that introduce new challenges in each of them. This is when we decided on creating a unique environment for each stage. We were very happy with how Gravitar: Recharged turned out with a light background and a dark foreground for the enemies and terrain so we used the same style. This helps the player and the enemies/terrain/collectibles stand out more in the game’s past pace gameplay.

How extensive are Caverns of Mars: Recharged’s new content additions?

Migauskas: Compared to the original – quite extensive. Lots more maps and navigation challenges, new unique enemies, a multitude of powerups at the player’s disposal, a brand new co-op mode with unique mechanics that we haven’t tried in previous Recharged games, a new upgrades system, and many more.

"We wanted for the co-op players to cooperate more so we tried to have distinct roles for each of them and I think it turned out great."

Did you have to make any tweaks to the game in order to make co-op fit in?

Migauskas: We had to tweak the co-op mode itself quite a bit compared to the previous Recharged games. In Caverns of Mars: Recharged co-op mode the two players have their separate roles – player one is the navigator who steers the ship, avoids the terrain, and slows down when needed. Player two is the aggressive drone that can shoot and clear a path. We tried to have both players have the same abilities, but we quickly found that the game becomes too easy in the beginning, and later it becomes a fight between resources among players. We wanted for the co-op players to cooperate more so we tried to have distinct roles for each of them and I think it turned out great.

What can you tell us about the game’s new soundtrack?

Megan McDuffee (Composer): As the game’s composer and music producer, I went in a very drum n’ bass direction with the soundtrack. Utilizing lots of retro samples, breakbeats, high energy rhythms, heavy synths, and quick melodic lines, I crafted a frantic yet fun sonic adventure for the player. Check it out on Bandcamp!

Since the reveal of the PS5 and Xbox Series’ specs, a lot of comparisons have been made between the GPU speeds of the two consoles, with the PS5 at 10.28 TFLOPS and the Xbox Series X at 12 TFLOPS. How much of an impact on development do you think that difference will have?

Migauskas: There are a lot of things to unpack here. You can see a general trend in games for consoles of previous generations – it takes a few years and a launched title or two for developers to realize and utilize the hardware capabilities. At the moment, the impact on development is still quite low. A ~15% increase is significant, but both GPUs are so powerful, most developers probably won’t bat an eye. You can do a bit more on one of them. And since most of the games launch on both of the consoles, you have to work with the lowest common denominator. In a year or two, when newer rendering approaches are developed, more rendering work will be expected to be pushed through the GPU pipelines. Then, it’s likely developers with more resources, mainly AAA companies using custom engines, will try to adhere to platform differences increasingly more.

The PS5 features an incredibly fast SSD with 5.5GB/s raw bandwidth. How can developers take advantage of this, and how does this compare to the Xbox Series X’s 2.4GB/s raw bandwidth?

Migauskas: The main thing will probably be less and less games with loading screens. With these disk speeds the amount of assets you can stream in is very high. Thus, games with proper asset streaming implementations should eventually become the norm, especially since the effective bandwidth is at least 2x higher. XSX bandwidth, while significantly lower, is still several times the speeds of previous generation consoles.

Both the PS5 and Xbox Series X boast Zen 2 CPUs, but there is a difference in the processors of both consoles. The Xbox Series X features 8x Zen 2 Cores at 3.8GHz, whereas the PS5 features 8x Zen 2 Cores at 3.5GHz. Your thoughts on this difference?

Migauskas: CPU work frequency differences are unlikely to have much impact. It would be hard to find a game that isn’t primarily bottlenecked by CPU memory access patterns. Cache utilization and proper data structure selections are still main concerns when thinking about performance, and higher clock rates don’t really help with that.

"As the game’s composer and music producer, I went in a very drum n’ bass direction with the soundtrack. Utilizing lots of retro samples, breakbeats, high energy rhythms, heavy synths, and quick melodic lines, I crafted a frantic yet fun sonic adventure for the player."

The Xbox Series S features lesser hardware compared to Xbox Series and Microsoft is pushing it as a 1440p/60 FPS console. Do you think it will be able to hold up for the more graphically intensive games as this generation progresses?

Migauskas: Short answer – no. If we take the (flawed) metric of FLOPS and compare XSX to XSS, you get a 3x difference in GPU computation power. Most of the current games use deferred pipelines, so rendered pixel count can translate to computation complexity pretty directly. Now, if we take the expected resolution targets for both consoles, we get a difference of 2.25x. Add that to lower available memory size, and it gets pretty hard to keep up.

Super Resolution is coming to PS5 and Xbox Series X/S. How do you think this will help game developers?

Migauskas: Yes, a lot. Just like with other supersampling solutions, tech like this takes a lot of rendering work off of graphics pipelines. This either allows to reach performance targets much more easily almost without sacrificing quality, or frees up the hardware so that it can be utilized for even more impressive visuals.

What frame rate and resolution will the game target on the PS5 and Xbox Series X/S?

Migauskas: 4K and 60 FPS.

What frame rate and resolution will the game target on the Switch in docked and undocked modes?

Migauskas: 1080p at 60fps docked, 720p and 60fps undocked.

What are your thoughts on the Steam Deck? Do you have plans for any specific optimizations for the device?

Migauskas: It’s a very capable piece of kit so no additional optimizations were needed.

NOTE: This interview was conducted prior to the game’s launch.

"Atari has a rich catalog of game titles that are extremely well-known and fondly remembered. Countless people still seek out and play our original games from the 70s and 80s, so we know the games remain popular."

Centipede was, of course, a classic arcade game back in its time. How did the idea to bring it back and reimagine it this way first come about?

Atari has a rich catalog of game titles that are extremely well-known and fondly remembered. Countless people still seek out and play our original games from the 70s and 80s, so we know the games remain popular.

We plan to bring these classic titles back in a number of ways.

• Making the classic games easier to find and play, so that you can get the original games on PC, consoles, mobile and streaming services without having to run emulation or hunt for original hardware
• Reimagining our games in ways that significantly change or expand the game play, for example the re-imagining of Food Fight we are developing with Mega Cat Studios.
• And the Recharged series, which seeks to modernize our classic games while staying true to the original game play

Taken together, our goal is to continue to engage with players that know and love these titles, while at the same time introducing them to a new generation of players.

Given how much time has passed since the original game release and how dramatically the medium as a whole has changed, how did you find the balance between staying true to the spirit of the original and modernizing it for the current market?

For the Recharged series we have built a team of creative people who love video games, love our classic titles, and leapt at the opportunity to update them. The guiding principle the team adheres to is maintaining and celebrating the gameplay that made the original titles so much fun to play. With every decision flowing from that starting point, it was easy to make decisions along the way that maintained a balance.

What are the biggest changes Centipede: Recharged makes to the formula of the original Centipede?

Our goal from the beginning was to stay true to the original game play, but modernize it so that it made sense for modern screens, controllers and the expectations of contemporary players.

The biggest change was the switch from a vertical playing field to a 16:9 ratio for modern screens. A lot of our decisions flowed from that initial reorientation. For example, the power ups we have added to the game obviously represent a big change, but they also become critical assets if you want to survive. With a 16:9 playing field the centipedes come at you faster, and the wider player area at the bottom of the screen just begs for power ups that allow you to clear out mushrooms and enemies with side shots.

"For the Recharged series we have built a team of creative people who love video games, love our classic titles, and leapt at the opportunity to update them. The guiding principle the team adheres to is maintaining and celebrating the gameplay that made the original titles so much fun to play."

A game such as this one has inherent replay value, but do you have plans to add to it with additional content down the line to keep players coming back?

A lot of players have already said that the unique challenge modes add a ton of replay value. That said, additional content and a few other potential extensions of Centipede and our other Recharged titles are under consideration. We have already created 10 additional challenge levels for each game on the Atari VCS version, so bringing more challenges (and leaderboards) to the other platforms is a possibility.  We have had a lot of feature requests, but we want to take a beat and listen to our players to find out what they really want before making any final decisions.

Megan McDuffee’s work has its fair share of fans, and rightfully so. What was the process like of working with her on Centipede: Recharged?

From her very first discussion with the Recharged producers, Megan locked onto what we were trying to accomplish. She composed a soundscape that evokes the era of the original arcade games, complements the visual aesthetic of the series, and has a hand-in-glove energy for the frenetic gameplay. Every time she submitted one of the 16 tracks she produced for the series, our producers would say “she nailed it, again!” Her work was so spot on that we never requested a single revision. She’s that good.

Do you have plans to add online co-op to the game?

We are always looking for ways to enhance the games, so online co-op might appear in some later titles in the series. While we have no immediate plans to add online co-op to Centipede: Recharged, the door is not closed.

Is Centipede: Recharged a blueprint of sorts that fans might expect to see applied to similar classic arcade revivals in the future?

Absolutely. We’ve already announced the next titles in the Recharged series — Black Widow, Asteroids, and Breakout. All the titles are built upon the same fundamentals and featureset. You will see rich vector-based visuals and particle effects, power ups, both arcade and challenge modes, and local co-op across all the titles.

When Black Widow: Recharged launches on October 28, you will immediately see that it shares the same exact power ups as Centipede: Recharged, the same visual aesthetic, and Megan has composed four tracks that are in the same general audio space as what she created for Centipede: Recharged, but match the unique vibe of Black Widow perfectly.

"We are always looking for ways to enhance the games, so online co-op might appear in some later titles in the series. While we have no immediate plans to add online co-op to Centipede: Recharged, the door is not closed. "

Since the reveal of the PS5 and Xbox Series’ specs, a lot of comparisons have been made between the GPU speeds of the two consoles, with the PS5 at 10.28 TFLOPS and the Xbox Series X at 12 TFLOPS. How much of an impact on development do you think that difference will have?

For the Recharged titles, we haven’t encountered any real difference in our development efforts. The games were engineered to achieve 60 FPS at maximum resolution for Switch, so we were never at a point where we bumped up against limits on the PS5 and Xbox Series X. That said, the added horsepower on those systems allows us to easily achieve native 4K output at 120FPS.

Both the PS5 and Xbox Series X boast Zen 2 CPUs, but there is a difference in the processors of both consoles. The Xbox Series X features 8x Zen 2 Cores at 3.8GHz, whereas the PS5 features 8x Zen 2 Cores at 3.5GHz. Your thoughts on this difference?

Despite the fast gameplay and rich visual effects in Recharged games, we’re not really taxing either of these CPUs. We set out to max the performance of each hardware platform, which in the case of the PS5 and Xbox Series X is 4K at 120FPS.

The Xbox Series S features lesser hardware compared to Xbox Series and Microsoft is pushing it as a 1440p/60 FPS console. Do you think it will be able to hold up for the more graphically intensive games as this generation progresses?

Just like there are graphics cards for PCs that range from powerful to ultra powerful, you see a progression from the Series S to the Series X. It is our job as game creators to make sure we can get every ounce of juice from each hardware platform, optimizing the games in such a way that they deliver the best possible performance without compromising the gameplay experience.

What frame rate and resolution will the game target on the PS5 and Xbox Series X/S?

The Atari Recharged games will target 4K at 120FPS on PS5 and Series X, 1440p at 120FPS on Series S.

"We’ve already announced the next titles in the Recharged series — Black Widow, Asteroids, and Breakout. All the titles are built upon the same fundamentals and featureset. You will see rich vector-based visuals and particle effects, power ups, both arcade and challenge modes, and local co-op across all the titles."

What frame rate and resolution will the game target on the Switch in docked and undocked modes?

The Atari Recharged games will target 720p at 60FPS in handheld, and 1080p at 60FPS in docked mode.

What are your thoughts on the Steam Deck? Do you have plans for any specific optimizations for the device?

We are excited that more hardware is coming into the handheld space. Handheld is a great format for pick-up and play games like Centipede: Recharged. We are looking forward to getting our hands on the Steam Deck. Once we have it in hand, we’ll evaluate what we need to do to get optimal performance.