As the arcade craze explodes, three women compete to become the world champion of Centipede, even as the genius behind it, gaming’s first female designer, fights to stop her creation from being stolen.

The untold story told for the first time through exclusive access and extensive interviews.

The Bug Blaster, a hybrid snake-humanoid—and our fearless hero—aimed a laser beam at a battery of enemies. Scorpions, spiders, and fleas poured down in furious waves. The worst of the lot were the giant centipedes, snaking through a spacescape of mushrooms, inching closer and closer. When the Blaster hit one segment of the centipede, it could grow another head and the danger doubled. Enemies could come alone or could come in groups, but enemies were coming.

The setting for this carnage was McCormick Place, Chicago’s sprawling convention center, Halloween weekend 1981. The 300,000-square-foot exhibit hall had become a whirl of blinking colored lights with parallel rows of the latest arcade video games. The occasion was the $50,000 Atari World Championships, the first of its kind. For the event’s marquee battle, organizers selected Centipede, the newest hit from Atari, the behemoth company behind Asteroids and Space Invaders. 280 Centipede arcade cabinets in their yellow-green glory lined the right side of the hall, ready to accommodate thousands of gamers. 

It was like a neighborhood arcade writ large. The young contestants came from all over the country and from a myriad of backgrounds. At first blush, every teen and twentysomething strutting the floors with feathered hair and flared jeans seemed a potential winner. But upon closer inspection, there were a special few who brought with them an intangible quality. A mastery, trained or innate, that granted them the capacity to take on a game designed to steal your morale with your very last scuffed-up quarter.

This was particularly true of a group of young women who scanned the long row of Centipede cabinets. People associated video games with men, and game companies rarely courted women; the arcades sprouting up around the country were considered such boys’ clubs that not long before this, women would sometimes be warned it could be dangerous just to enter them. They certainly were not expected to impress anyone with their play.

In crossing the threshold of McCormick Place, the “lady arcaders” were instant underdogs. They had the burden to prove that they could live up to their male counterparts. That they belonged. Three of these women—Julie Winecoff, Ok Soo Han and Faith Sloan—were poised for an ultimate showdown with each other and with the doubters. For this trio, along with an ambitious event organizer and an unforeseen visitor who carried the fate of Centipede in her hands, there was far more at stake than an invasion of digital myriapods. Beneath the surface of this championship brewed desperate secrets and dreams. 96 hours remained to find a way to triumph.

Lee Peppard, 39, dashed around the convention center, a whirlwind of restlessness. With balding hair, prominent ears, and full lips, he radiated confidence and energy. The tournament promised to be the biggest stepping stone yet in his career as a promoter.

The onetime bar manager and traveling salesman had started his gaming career by running four miniature golf courses. Then, in the early 1970s, Lee launched a foosball tournament at a bar he managed, which went national under an umbrella entity known as Tournament Games, Inc. His increasingly swanky annual tournament eventually sported $250,000 in prizes and landed coverage in Sports Illustrated. But as the decade came to a close, a shiny competitor landed on the scene—coin-operated video games. The very same teenagers who had once thrilled to spin foosball rods now poured their spending money into the coin slots of Pac-Man. Atari’s sales alone increased 120% in just twelve months. Tournament Games’ revenues plummeted, and Lee’s future dimmed.

But a reprieve seemed to be in store in early 1981, when Lee received a phone call from the president of Atari, tapping him to join the red-hot craze by overseeing arguably the highest profile video game event—the inaugural World Championship. 

Atari handed Lee a $40,000 check and announced the partnership in the trade journals. McCormick Place was fully outfitted. As the lengthy row of doors opened, Lee could see the contestants flow toward the sounds of the games. “The symphony of electronic noises,” as a local ABC news reporter put it, “is the music of money.” 

But the profits Lee had in mind included a clandestine plan, one he had to keep hidden away from everyone inside and outside McCormick Place.

Julie Winecoff, 21, marveled at every sight outside her airplane window. She had never flown before, and she was awestruck. As the plane’s landing gear bounced upon the runway in Chicago, her grand adventure continued. When she arrived at her hotel on massive Wacker Drive, next door to the McCormick Center, the lobby and halls were packed. The hotel offered a special package rate to tournament-goers. The naturally gregarious young woman reveled in being around so many kindred spirits.

Julie was a skinny, loose-limbed class clown with friendly eyes and straight brown hair. Back in Charlotte, North Carolina, she was an unemployed truck driver. Her hangout destination of choice was a dive bar named Pappy’s. Because the owner of Pappy’s also owned Owl Distribution Company, the local distributor for coin-operated machines, Pappy’s boasted the latest games all in pristine working order. The bar’s atmosphere was relaxed; customers could pay their tabs at the end of the week. Julie and her mostly male buddies spent endless hours there, drinking beer and wine and challenging each other to arcade games. Julie loved Space Invaders, she loved Galaga, but her favorite machine was Centipede, which featured a visually arresting pastel color scheme never before seen in an arcade game, and an intense gameplay that called on every nuance of hand-eye coordination.

When the Atari World Championships in Chicago was announced, the owner of Pappy’s put the word out. Around the country, free admission to the event depended on first winning a series of regional tournaments. Each local bar had the flexibility to choose which game its contestants would compete on, meaning that participants had to be prepared for any game a bar owner picked.

Julie won the competition for the entire city of Charlotte. “I was the only girl,” she says. “I was the only one. I beat the dudes.” But while her admission to the Chicago event was now free, the penniless “video junkie” still needed a way to pay for her plane ticket and hotel fare. She drove her battered 1974 Chevy Vega to the State Employees Credit Union, where she was a member, and borrowed $400 against the car’s title to pay for her journey.

Now strolling the Windy City, with its wide streets and sky-stretching towers, she kept her camera handy. She snapped photos of street art, wall murals, skyscrapers, the scaffolded bridges spanning the canal. Her deep Southern drawl stuck out. But even as she played the eager tourist, her mind was also focused on the looming competition. If Julie didn’t pull off a victory in Chicago, not only would she lose her car, she would be flat broke.

Faith Sloan, 22, bopped about the floor with her short-cropped hair and wide smile. She delighted in the seemingly endless rows of cutting-edge video games lined up like sentries throughout the room’s cavernous aisles. From the sides of the Centipede cabinets, the alien centipede with glowing red eyes snarled its warning. Faith could never resist a challenge.

A native of Chicago who was currently majoring in statistics at the University of Illinois in the city, Faith lived on the Northwest side, raised in an all-Black neighborhood. A self-confessed “nerd,” her love of reading books and her early interest in computers had stood out to her peers. Just as arcade games were not marketed to women, the Black community was largely ignored in the marketing of computer technology.

In the mid-1970s, when Faith was 16 years old, she got her first computer. She had ordered the machine, which featured a membrane keyboard, from the Soviet Union after reading about it in a computer magazine. Using her family’s black-and-white TV with rabbit ears as her monitor, she taught herself Basic programming and created some simple scripts in math and spelling. It was a private hobby; neither her family nor the other kids at school knew anything about it.

For a technology buff like Faith, video games were a natural fit. She first became obsessed in college, when, after classes on West Harrison Street, she would head to the Near East Side to gorge on Greek food and drink beer. To get to Greektown, Faith had to change trains in Downtown Chicago, where arcades popped up like daisies. Faith would lug her backpack crammed with books to the Greyhound station, stow her belongings in a locker, and then hustle to the nearest arcade. She didn’t have a lot of spare money, so she made her quarters last as long as possible by gradually improving her play.

She would play until the sun went down and night crept in. Like Julie in North Carolina, Faith was usually the only woman in the “Boys’ Towns” (as she privately called them) that were the local arcades. She blasted flying saucers in Asteroids, she gobbled dots and ghosts in Pac-Man, but Centipede was her favorite. It seemed, in some ineffable way, the most joyous. She played, as always, by herself, as much a loner in college as she’d been in high school. “At first I wasn’t taken seriously by the guys, but it got to the point where they realized I was indeed good, and they changed their tune,” she recalls. “You know how guys are.” Once the men recognized Faith’s skills, they cheered, cautiously at first and then unabashedly. This attention made her feel like a superhero.

One day, in a downtown arcade, Faith saw an advertisement for the upcoming Atari World Championships. She lived in the city, she loved video games, and she could not resist a challenge. The decision to walk through the doors into the giant convention center was a no-brainer.

‘This is going to be cool,’ she thought. ‘All these people playing games, this is going to be great.’

Ok Soo Han, 25, was just off the plane from Los Angeles, and she brought something the other young women did not have with them: her mother. As the two strolled the Expocenter’s vast aisles of games, the round-cheeked, perfectly-coiffed young visitor was quite certain that the Atari World Championships was the coolest event she had ever attended, even aside from the $50,000 in total prize money.

For Ok Soo, video games were strictly business, or at least they had been at first. The recent college grad and native of Northridge, California, had been living with her parents while dreaming of breaking into the fashion industry. Her father, a savvy businessman, planned to buy Ok Soo a boutique shop in a new shopping center under construction in nearby Westlake Village.

In the meantime, inspired by the video game boom, her parents bought a barebones arcade in Pico Rivera, southeast of downtown Los Angeles. “Why don’t you do the arcade with us until the Westlake mall is finished?” Han’s father asked. The entrepreneurial Ok Soo agreed; fashion could wait a few more months.

Ok Soo and her mother took on the day-to-day business of running the place, spending long hours amidst the noisy, flashing machines. Soon the arcade filled up with avid gamers from the Los Angeles basin. Ok Soo befriended many of them, even dating one. Ok Soo had never played video games, but knowing the ins-and-outs seemed important for business. Her mother agreed, and soon the two of them were joining their customers in rounds of Pac-Man and Galaga. During the arcade’s off-hours, Ok Soo would continue practicing. As much as she loved Pac-Man, her favorite machine was Centipede; as a designer herself, Ok Soo cherished the game’s unique aesthetics. She had fun, and she was good. Too good, maybe, when it came to men.

“Sometimes,” she admitted, “when I’m just playing with men who are friends I try to lose so their pride won’t be hurt.”

On Pico Boulevard, Ok Soo and her family would frequent C.A. Robinson & Co., an amusement industry distributorship with arcade and pinball machines. One of Ok Soo’s father’s associates, an industry insider, would come along, providing insights into why some games attracted more players than others.

When C.A. Robinson & Co. sent the family a flyer about the upcoming Atari World Championships and its accompanying tradeshow, Ok Soo’s father excitedly suggested she attend. He also had caught video game fever. But since Ok Soo’s parents weren’t about to let her travel 2,000 miles alone, her mother cheerfully made the journey to Chicago with her.

It seemed unlikely that a young woman who had been playing video games for mere months could make headway in a competition filled with experts. But like Julie, Ok Soo had a practical reason for setting her sights on prize money. She had been in an accident and her car had been damaged. “If I win, I’d like to buy a car,” she said at the time, then seemed to think better of it: “But I’d also like to donate some money for the orphans in Korea.”

Wandering the Chicago convention center, Ok Soo chatted with other competitors while eagerly observing their gameplay. “I was not intimidated by anybody,” she says. Given her experience watching gamers in her family’s arcade, it would have been easy to spot the quiet master among the crowd: the tall, shaggy-haired Eric Ginner. The 19-year-old was already well-known in the “vid kid” community. He had flown out straight from the heart of Silicon Valley — Mountain View, California — with his eyes fixed squarely on the first place trophy.

The women had to prove they could stand toe-to-toe with a whiz like Ginner. He had been training 10 hours a week, every week. Ok Soo had played Centipede for the first time just three months before, and by comparison to Ginner had hardly practiced. And she was a fashion designer, of all things. Rumor had it that Ginner, the “video game wizard,” also identified a “glitch” in Centipede that could allow him to avoid his Bug Blaster from ever being killed. The challengers may have lost before they slid in the first quarter.

In that same convention center, at the same time, there was an unassuming stranger with dark, wavy hair. Julie, Faith, and Ok Soo could have passed her in the corridors, stood shoulder to shoulder in the elevator, waited behind her at the vending machines. But they could not have guessed that without her, the competition they were embarking on would never have existed. Centipede would not have existed.

She was Dona Bailey — the 26-year-old phenom creator of Centipede. She had just flown in from Sunnyvale, California, where Atari’s headquarters were located. Here in Chicago, Atari was hosting their annual co-op trade show at the same time as their World Championship. Like the tournament, the trade show was brimming with activity, mostly of men in suits. “It was like being on another planet,” Dona would later lament of what it felt like to be the only woman almost anywhere she went in professional circles.

As Atari’s only female game developer, and one of the company’s few female employees, period, she had endured continual hazing. One developer took every opportunity to ridicule and dismiss her intelligence, constantly telling her that she was unqualified for the job. Remarkably, Centipede had been Dona’s first project at Atari, but when it was released, a colleague repeatedly took credit for the game, refusing to publicly mention Dona’s name.

Centipede was the only arcade game that was equally popular among male and female players, which hardly seemed coincidental. “My primary goal was to make a game that would be visually appealing to me,” Dona says. “I wanted to make a game that was beautiful.” Centipede looked different than any other arcade game at the time. And Atari hailed it as a “blockbuster.” Part of the appeal, too, was that the game did not scare away a first-time user. Yet, as the unofficial guidebook to Centipede cautioned, if it was easy to play, it was near impossible to master. “The game never lets up for a moment, never stops challenging you,” the 140-page guide explained of what made it special. The gameplay was not simply a repeating pattern, but rather a labyrinth filled with constant surprises.

Now, as Dona walked the trade floor at McCormick Place, a member of the Atari management team, Rick Montcrief, rushed over and took her by the arm. He steered her toward the convention center’s exit. Montcrief explained to the confused Dona that she needed to come with him right away. There was an emergency. Centipede was in danger.

For Lee Peppard, juggling his secret objectives and real goals became more difficult. Through non-arcade competitions set up on the periphery of the Atari World Championships, he was trying to sell off inventory of foosball, hockey, and billiards accessories manufactured under his Tournament Games banner. That way, Lee could use the foot traffic generated by the excitement of the Atari World Tournaments to line his pocket with cash he did not have to split with Atari. In fact, Lee was counting on this. He anticipated that even if the tournament lost up to $100,000, he would still earn that amount and more for himself, through the sale of his products.

Such strategies dated back to Lee’s earliest professional ventures. When promoting other gaming tournaments, he would shift major expenses up front to maximize marketing write offs sooner rather than later. But then, like clockwork, Tournament’s bills would come due before he had sufficient funds to pay them. He would dig himself into a hole and then count on creditors to pull him out. To deal with the mess, he would pay his creditors on a staggered time schedule: some slowly, some late, and some not at all. By the time Atari approached him, Lee was, unsurprisingly, heavily in debt to multiple companies.

Three of these companies — Sutra, U.S. Billiards, and Arachnid — had a vested interest in the long-term viability of Tournament Games, Inc.; otherwise, they would never get paid. Using Atari’s commitment as his bond, Peppard secured $20,000 guarantees from each of these companies for the upcoming event. He was leveraging his temporary role with the video game behemoth to keep other endeavors from going bust — but these creditors didn’t know that Atari’s commitment rested on shaky ground.

Atari’s team had already started to suss out the fact that Lee was in trouble. Executives were deeply unhappy with Lee’s attempt to hijack the Atari tournaments as his tournaments. Because the company’s involvement had already been announced to the press, Atari could not back out. Instead, the company negotiated a new agreement to pay Lee a reduced fee of $100,000, far less impressive than the $240,000 they had initially earmarked.

Even with a slashed revenue stream, the Atari competition was left as Lee’s only lifeline, and the key to preserving his $20,000 from the other corporations. He needed the Centipede championship battles to make as big a splash as possible. Especially intriguing were the women ready to compete. The novelty of these competitors could bring added attention and publicity to his event, and that extra attention could be a deus ex machina, saving his status as a top-tier promoter.

On the morning of the Centipede championship, Julie Winecoff, the 21-year-old truck driver from Charlotte, couldn’t contain her excitement — or her nerves. As she wandered McCormick Place, she felt intoxicated by the exhibit hall’s immensity, by the varied gameplay, by the Ford EXP budget car giveaway, and even by the dark, bearded charm of Atari Vice President Frank Ballouz, who took Julie’s interest in gaming seriously. He gave her his business card and said, “If there’s ever anything I can do for you, let me know.”

California contestant Ok Soo Han found the action and buzz around the convention center to be just as intriguing as her fellow competitors. She knew the games themselves could lure people into mistakes. Sometimes the most appealing aspect of gameplay — pounding rapidly on a “fire” button, for example — was not the key to victory.

Ok Soo had also brought to Chicago a very practical mission: a win could bring valuable free publicity to her family’s arcade, a boon to a small business.

Ok Soo participated in side tournaments to warm up, but these generated some anxiety. At one point, one of the men cried when she beat him. “I felt so bad,” she said, though she admitted to a paradox that occurred when she tried to suppress her natural ability: “When I try to lose I do better.” Still, it may have rattled her more than she realized, because the previous night, while practicing, she was roundly beaten in a match with a lesser player. She seemed to be getting in her own head, unconsciously believing that maybe a woman shouldn’t win.

Faith Sloan, the Chicago native, was surprised she did not run into any of the gamers she knew from the downtown arcades at McCormick Place. As someone who lived on Chicago’s all-Black West Side, and who was accustomed to the all-Black population of the city’s downtown arcades, she was struck most by the fact that almost everyone else at the tournament was white. She had to confront the reality that she would be seen as an outsider by many, both as a woman and a person of color.

Still, the day was proving to be a welcome break after a week of quantitative methods classes. Faith even shot a game of pool with the young television star and Happy Days heartthrob Scott Baio — or at least she thought it was Scott Baio. The pool player was more likely Matthew Labyorteaux, 14, one of the stars of NBC’s Little House on the Prairie, an avid Pac Man and Centipede player who also came to compete for the championship. Either way, Faith was having a blast.

Dona Bailey listened to Atari executive Montcrief hurriedly explain why they were dashing away from their own trade show at McCormick Place: there was a criminal knockoff of Centipede in their midst.

Once outside the convention center, Montcrief flagged down a cab. He instructed the driver to ferry Dona to the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, and he told Dona that, once there, she should wait in front of the courthouse for the Atari legal team. He slammed the cab door, banged on the roof, and the taxi sped away.

At the majestic courthouse on South Dearborn Street, Dona got out and stood in the freezing cold. Once the lawyers arrived, they led her inside, explaining that two Australians, an electrical engineer and a programmer, had months ago purchased a Centipede game and reverse-engineered it to create a shoddy knockoff called War of the Bugs. The game pirates had come to Chicago to attend the tradeshow, selling the knockoff for half-price out of their hotel room to vendors. Atari’s attorneys wanted to file an emergency injunction for the men to cease and desist their criminal copyright infringement.

“What’s my part?” Dona anxiously asked. “What questions will I be asked on the stand?”

“There’s no telling!” the lawyers exclaimed.

They said the case was being rushed onto the court’s docket as an emergency petition filed just minutes before. Dona felt like she was in some alternate reality. She was nervous and yet invigorated by the rapid shift in her day. The lawyers, too, seemed invigorated by the unpredictable challenge.

The large, lavish courtroom was ornamented with marble, polished wood and elegant lighting. The bench seemed massive, especially in contrast to the tiny Judge Samuel Perry, 84, who reigned behind it, who probably had never laid eyes on an arcade game. The feeling that Perry came from a different era was exaggerated by the fact that a prehistoric mastodon had once been discovered in his backyard. Despite his diminutive size, the judge had no problem dominating the courtroom: He talked with his hands, waved his arms for attention, barked out orders, and dispatched bailiffs to locate papers and summon defendants.

The Atari team and the defendants’ attorney crowded in front of the bench. They began sparring. The judge asked to see the “item” — meaning the knockoff Centipede cabinet. When informed it was not in the courtroom, he scowled with anger. The Atari lawyers hastened to explain why their case was so last-minute, also describing for the judge the weight and unwieldiness of game cabinets.

If vendors mulling around the Chicago convention center began to snap up the counterfeit games at lower prices for their arcades — at an inflection point of the video game craze — the still-new Centipede’s place in the marketplace could be diluted, undermined, even ruined.

When Judge Perry learned the counterfeit game War of the Bugs was in a nearby hotel room, he made an unconventional decision: They would pick up all their briefs and motions and move the proceeding.

ee Peppard was now in a full blown panic. Despite his dire finances and his tussles with Atari, he had expected to fill his coffers once the tournament arrived. In the weeks leading up to the event, he had assured anyone who would listen that he’d make off like a bandit. But now, as he stalked the McCormick Place exhibit halls like a hunted animal, a nauseating reality was setting in. His dream of vindication had taken on a nightmarish hue.

Not only had Lee been relying on the tournament to sell his products, but he had also counted on the contestants’ entry fees to provide money for their prizes. But he was his own worst enemy. For contestants not covered by a regional sponsor, the high cost of the entry fee — $60 — had turned off some potential attendees. This was coupled with the fact that non-local contestants had to pay for their own airfare and hotel rooms. Given that the majority of gamers were teenagers and young adults, this presented an especially steep challenge. In a final insult, contestants had to pay another fee to gain entrance to McCormick Place. The more casual gamers could be forgiven for staying home and allowing the most dedicated among them to take center stage, lessening Lee’s total potential income.

On top of everything else, Lee did not have enough staff for everything that had to be done. As a result, people who had no business handling the event’s money handled it anyway. What Lee called his “cash controls” were lost. Disaster followed when thousands of dollars disappeared in what he euphemistically referred to as “slippage.” His crowning achievement was turning into his last stand.

It was a sight on that frigid October afternoon: An elderly robed judge, two bailiffs, one court reporter, five Atari attorneys from California, six attorneys from the Chicago firm working with Atari, one defense attorney, two Australian defendants, and Dona Bailey emerged from the courthouse and walked one block to the rundown hotel where the fraudsters were staying, not far from the glittering McCormick Place, but in its shabby ambience a world away.

The room in which the two Australians had holed up was so small that it held only a twin bed and the fake Centipede game cabinet. Dona was instructed to sit on the bed, play the game, and point out the ways in which it was similar to the licensed Centipede. The diminutive Judge Perry and the court reporter entered the room with her. The attorneys and the defendants could not quite squeeze into the room. Instead the group crowded outside the doorway, jostling against one another as they attempted to follow the action.

Once Dona began playing the game, she grew infuriated. Still only in her mid-twenties, she had gone from male colleagues who refused to acknowledge her contributions, to strange men who tried to swipe her accomplishments outright. It was hard not to imagine her opponents being like the pixelated centipede itself, who grew new heads each time it was blasted.

She felt as angry at the poor quality of the knockoff as she felt by the fact that her work had been stolen. As she described the myriad features the Australians had ripped off, the court reporter took notes, and the judge peppered her with questions. The soft-spoken Dona suggested the judge try his own hand at the game; though he cheerfully agreed, he lost three lives almost as soon as he started playing. Dona assured him this was perfectly common the first time around.

After a brief pause, Judge Perry announced that he intended to take his young nephew to an arcade near his house to play the Atari version. Dona’s final view of the judge that afternoon was the back of his robe swirling in the Chicago wind as he strode away, on a legal quest to find Centipede.It was a sight on that frigid October afternoon: An elderly robed judge, two bailiffs, one court reporter, five Atari attorneys from California, six attorneys from the Chicago firm working with Atari, one defense attorney, two Australian defendants, and Dona Bailey emerged from the courthouse and walked one block to the rundown hotel where the fraudsters were staying, not far from the glittering McCormick Place, but in its shabby ambience a world away.

The room in which the two Australians had holed up was so small that it held only a twin bed and the fake Centipede game cabinet. Dona was instructed to sit on the bed, play the game, and point out the ways in which it was similar to the licensed Centipede. The diminutive Judge Perry and the court reporter entered the room with her. The attorneys and the defendants could not quite squeeze into the room. Instead the group crowded outside the doorway, jostling against one another as they attempted to follow the action.

Once Dona began playing the game, she grew infuriated. Still only in her mid-twenties, she had gone from male colleagues who refused to acknowledge her contributions, to strange men who tried to swipe her accomplishments outright. It was hard not to imagine her opponents being like the pixelated centipede itself, who grew new heads each time it was blasted.

She felt as angry at the poor quality of the knockoff as she felt by the fact that her work had been stolen. As she described the myriad features the Australians had ripped off, the court reporter took notes, and the judge peppered her with questions. The soft-spoken Dona suggested the judge try his own hand at the game; though he cheerfully agreed, he lost three lives almost as soon as he started playing. Dona assured him this was perfectly common the first time around.

After a brief pause, Judge Perry announced that he intended to take his young nephew to an arcade near his house to play the Atari version. Dona’s final view of the judge that afternoon was the back of his robe swirling in the Chicago wind as he strode away, on a legal quest to find Centipede.

“Atari and TGI [Tournament Games, Inc.] Welcomes You to the World Championships.” The banners hung from the ceiling throughout the hall. Rows of trophies glimmered at the front of the room.

Many of the players who entered McCormick Place hadn’t been aware until that very moment that the gameplay would be restricted to three minutes, no matter how well they performed. The Atari engineers reprogrammed the machines with a built in timer that would be displayed to the player and cut off play after three minutes. In another byproduct of Lee Peppard’s disorganized planning, contestants had to provide their own quarters for the machines, sending some scurrying for change.

Contenders gathered around the game’s arcade cabinets, ready for their turns. Given the three-minute time limit, it would not be about how many levels they could go through, but how decisively they could demonstrate their skills. Today’s three-minute window was all or nothing, with no second tries. Three minutes and a few quarters to prove to the world you were the best. Flashing bulbs and news cameras pushed in closer to the players.

Faith Sloan tied a red bandana tightly around her head. This, along with a dark vest, gave her the air of a Wild West gunslinger. Despite her love of statistical models, her approach was instinctual and adrenaline-fueled, a mantra to “play, play, play, play, play.” Her three minutes of gameplay flew by in a blur as she lost herself in the rapture of competition. A half-circle of her fellow female contestants paid keen attention as she laid waste to the insects on her screen. From around the exhibit hall came the din of hundreds of other machines, the shouts and claps and cries from other competitions, the animated chatter of the tournament’s attendees, but Faith heard nothing; she was in her own world. When her time was up, and her gaming reverie over, she had no memory of what had just occurred, she simply felt the exhilaration.

Julie Winecoff usually winged it when it came to playing video games, a reflection of her generally improvisational attitude towards life. But while she might have come across to the other contestants as an exceedingly laid-back Southerner, she felt far from calm and collected inside. She appeared in a light-colored Atari T-shirt provided by the event. With her finances on the line, she was a bundle of nerves. Almost immediately, however, the familiar, visceral pleasure of the arcade atmosphere took over. She might have been back at Pappy’s bar in North Carolina, drinking wine with friends and taking turns on the latest machines. Her eyes, fully focused on her screen, were serious, but a grin played on her lips. When her turn was finished, she stepped back from the game and heaved a contented sigh. She had performed as well as she ever had when playing for fun back home.

Ron Dubren, author of The Video Master’s Guide to Centipede, would soon opine on the special psychological challenge of the three-minute version of Centipede that was designed for the Championships: “In the 3-minute game, you purposely pursue risk, while in the long game, you purposely avoid it.” A window of opportunity opened. Even if the Championship’s frontrunner, Eric Ginner, had really spotted a hidden glitch, as rumored, it might not garner him enough points in the game’s three-minute mode to lap the field.

Unlike Faith’s instinctive and Julie’s experiential methods of gaming, Ok Soo Han decided to bet on tactics. She took her place at the controls in a flowing white blouse with a lace collar. As her three minutes commenced, and electronic insects began attacking en masse from the top of her arcade screen, her Bug Blaster fired. Each blasted insect separated into pieces and continued to fall. Ok Soo began building walls of insect parts and destroying them, using the insects’ own tendencies to cluster together against them. That was her strategy: to build a wall and then systematically demolish it. By slowing down the pace of the game, she could stockpile points while keeping her Bug Blaster safe. “I concentrate on everything that comes out,” she explained to the news crews, “and [that] gives me points.” She was hardly an arrogant personality, but Ok Soo, who believed she harbored a risk-taking side of her personality, found herself possessed by an unshakeable feeling as her time elapsed. She might really win.

When all was tallied, Faith Sloan came in third among all the women who competed. She would be returning home $1,000 richer in combined cash and prizes. Her siblings would be shocked; they didn’t even know she played arcade games. Still, she wouldn’t dwell on her success. She had exams to study for. Come Monday, she’d be back in classes on West Harrison Street.

Julie, declared the second-place winner in the women’s category, felt profound relief. With her prize earnings — $700 in cash and a $1,300 gift certificate for Atari products — she could pay off her car title and have money left to burn. When she got back home, drinks at Pappy’s would be on her.

The women all knew who came out on top. Ok Soo’s unexpected strategy had propelled her to a rousing first-place finish by a mile. She had destroyed the competition as efficiently as she had destroyed the game’s digital insects. Ok Soo, Faith, and Julie posed together for a photo in front of the Centipede cabinets, each showing off big smiles at their collective triumph: proving they belonged.

They never knew about the corporate intrigue perpetrated by Lee Peppard, who stood on the sidelines out of the way of the photos, hoping all the numbers would somehow add up.

As trophies were given out across McCormick Place, it turned out that the grand prize for the men’s Centipede champion, which as expected went to Eric Ginner, was $15,000, while the top women’s prize for Ok Soo was a comparatively meager $4,000. This, in spite of the fact that Ok Soo scored 53,220 points — a score that guidebook author Ron Dubren was not sure was even possible in the three-minute game — compared to Ginner’s 52,431 points. (In fact, even the men’s second place winner, scoring 7,679 fewer points than Ok Soo, received nearly double Ok Soo’s prize money.) Not only did Ginner receive more than five times the amount of money for a lower score than Ok Soo’s, but he would go on to be called “world’s greatest Centipede player” without mention of his higher-scoring female peer.

Crowds at the Atari World Championship watch Eric Ginner play.

Shy by nature, Ok Soo felt embarrassed by the attention of the trophy presentation. As she gripped her trophy, her beaming mom looked on proudly. But there was still the issue of the women’s dramatically and unfairly lower prizes — a final surprise enemy to fall out of the sky. When the reporters were finished snapping photos and asking questions, Ok Soo turned to Atari’s Frank Ballouz, who was chatting with the winners, and made an unexpected request. Instead of the $4,000 in prize money, could she have a new Centipede machine sent to her family’s arcade in California? Ballouz agreed. The cabinet, itself worth thousands, could bring in an average of $225 a week, far more over time than $4,000 to her family’s arcade, and for that matter more than Ginner’s $15,000; as Dona Bailey had done throughout her career, Ok Soo had outwitted inequity with ingenuity. It was, in video game terminology, a kill screen, an unexpected and unprogrammed ending that few players could find a way to reach.

Dona Bailey, Judge Perry, the lawyers, and the defendants reconvened in the courtroom. True to his word, the judge had accompanied his nephew to an arcade to watch him play Centipede. The judge now greeted Dona by complimenting her on her game design. She nodded her thanks.

The defense attorneys attempted to manipulate Dona into testifying that computer code should not be copyrighted, but she rebuffed them. The heat of her response left the defense with little room to maneuver.

The judge granted Atari the emergency injunction, ruling, in somewhat stilted fashion, that in both games “the worms travel in the same manner. The shots were fired in the same manner. The whole arrangement was very similar.” The company’s lawyers jubilantly pounded each other’s backs. Dona was equally elated. Not only had she protected her creation, but she had triumphed over yet another cadre of men trying to steal her work right out from under her. At the same time, reality set in. She had engineered another victory for her male colleagues to celebrate and profit from, largely excluding her. She would return to her hotel room alone and pack her bags to return to California.

When Julie flew home to Charlotte, she received a hero’s welcome at Pappy’s. Though she was the one with the $700 prize check, her fellow patrons turned the tables and bought drinks for her. Even the local TV station came and interviewed her. She signed an autograph for a fan. “I’ve been trying to keep my swelled head down to size,” she jokingly told a reporter. “I had trouble fitting on the airplane last night.” The next day Julie took her check straight to the credit union and retrieved her car title.

Several days later, she received a puzzling phone call from a Chicago newspaper. “Have you been to the bank yet?” the reporter asked. “Have you cashed your check?” Julie responded that she had. “Well, the checks are bouncing,” the reporter told her. “You might want to investigate.”

Julie contacted the credit union and learned that her prize check had indeed bounced. Rattled, she whipped out the card Atari’s Frank Ballouz had given her. When he picked up the phone, she said, “You told me to contact you if I had any issues. Guess what happened?” Ballouz answered grimly that he was already aware of the problem. The next day he Fedexed her a $2,000 check, money that was supposed to come from the funds provided to Lee Peppard. In the end, Julie had come out ahead: in addition to the expected $700, her $1,300 gift certificate for Atari products was now a cash prize instead.

The Atari World Championship had sealed the promoter’s fate; he could no longer stave off his creditors or maintain the membrane of illusion that Tournament Games, Inc. was a solvent entity. His operation had been exposed as a sort of inadvertent pyramid scheme, with Lee at its hollow center. The thread of its unraveling had been pulled from within.

Now, with the tournament winners’ checks bouncing left and right, and with Lee also unable to pay the tens of thousands of dollars he owed to the host hotel, Atari’s Ballouz informed the various companies to which Lee was indebted that the event in Chicago had gone “past the point of positive public relations value.” Following Ballouz’s phone calls, Sutra, U.S. Billiards, and Arachnid withdrew their $20,000 guarantees, further torpedoing the continued viability of Lee’s company.

Lee, tilting at windmills, blamed Atari. The Illinois attorney general, smelling blood, launched its own investigation of the Chicago fiasco. In the end, the outmatched Lee was like one of the wriggling centipedes Ok Soo Han, Julie Winecoff, and Faith Sloan had blasted to bits inside McCormick Place: His company went bankrupt, he lost his house, and his wife divorced him. After sinking to the depths, the chastened game promoter eventually resurfaced, launching a dart supply company based in Tacoma, Washington.

Dona Bailey returned to Atari’s Silicon Valley offices after the unexpected twists in Chicago. The following year the company released a sequel to Centipede, called Millipede, without including Dona in its design; it never achieved the success of the original. Soon after, Dona left Atari to help form her own company while continuing her groundbreaking career as a game developer. Centipede is the first, and one of the most popular, arcade games designed by a woman, and it retains a cult following of those who honor Dona’s work.

After graduating from the University of Illinois at Chicago, Faith Sloan launched a long career in technology, spending decades in Silicon Valley — where she was one of the rare Black female faces — and traveling to more than 200 countries around the globe. Now living in Chicago, Faith has become a tireless champion of the futuristic promises of cryptocurrency.

After their dual victories in the men’s and women’s competitions, Eric Ginner was thrust into video game “superstardom,” and was even cast in a TV pilot for an arcade competition show, while Ok Soo Han spent two more years working in her family’s arcade. Ok Soo then combined her love of design with her meticulous understanding of what entertains young people by launching a thirty-year career as a toy designer for Mattel.

Meanwhile Julie Winecoff parlayed her self-effacing humor into a decades-long career as a successful stand-up comedian in regional and national venues. Her thirst for public acclaim may have been fostered, she now realizes, by the unexpected adventures at the Atari World Championships. She has never forgotten the buzz of that magical weekend in Chicago, the thrill of being young and away from home for the very first time. It was, she says, one of the highlights of her life.

On one glorious October weekend in 1981, they were all contenders and were all champions.

And if the three women were ever reunited, with a Centipede cabinet at hand? Julie feels certain they would jump right back into the fray.

COREY MEAD is the author of THE LOST PILOTS, ANGELIC MUSIC, and WAR PLAY. He is an Associate Professor of English at Baruch College, CUNY.

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