As of the New Year I've begun doing a bit of house-cleaning. Over the past six months I've been working on a really big and project so I've hoarded a rather ridiculous number of Game Boy carts that I'll never touch again, so it's time I figure out which ones those are and start making room for new ones. As I've been going through all these carts, I've also found some interesting occurrences in the little Gray Brick's library. Take the arcade classic Centipede for instance. Sure it's a solid little fixed-screen shooter. But for the life of me I can't understand why the game was ported to the original Game Boy three times!

[img width=300 height=300]http://i.imgur.com/i6YIf.jpg[/img]

The first version of Centipede was released in 1992 by Accolade who were also responsible for designing the Game Boy port. The music is great and the sprites are just big enough to work well on the GB's tiny screen. However this particular version has become a collector's item as it is extremely rare that it pops up on eBay even. Really the only people who are going to be after it are completionists though.


[img width=300 height=300]http://i.imgur.com/mh747.jpg[/img]

Three years later Majesco re-released Centipede as the second volume in their Arcade Classic series of Game Boy cartridges. This time it was coupled with a port of its sequel Millipede as well. But guess what? Although published by Majesco, a glance at the title screen reveals that this port of Centipede was in fact developed by Accolade! If you just want a port of the game to go, then this is your best bet since you get two games for one.


[img width=300 height=300]http://i.imgur.com/KdqvJ.jpg[/img]

Here's where the story really starts to get strange. In 1998 Majesco decided to re-release Centipede once again, but this time without Millipede. So really, this is basically just a re-release of the original 1992 version that Accolade had published. However, they also went through the trouble of designing brand new artwork for this version as well. This is the most common of the Game Boy versions.


[img width=300 height=300]http://i.imgur.com/hkdD6.jpg[/img]

As a bit of an addendum, and to make the history even more confusing, that very same year Majesco went ahead and colorized their "new" version of Centipede and managed to get it released as part of the Game Boy Color's launch in the US. This GBC cart was one of the early black cartridges that was fully backwards compatible with the original Game Boy, meaning that it just contained an optional color palette which was accessed when inserted into the GBC hardware, rather than taking advantage of the GBC's full potential. So in a sense, this would be the fourth time that the same version of Centipede made it to market in a single decade.


Stay tuned for more bizarre tales of Game Boy gluttony.

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