www.youtube.com/watch?v=
This famous Atari commercial for Centipede is about fifty percent cooler than the game itself was, featuring a New Wave soundtrack and a makeout scene between a hot blonde and a giant centipede. Discovered by the good people at Retroist, the commercial is like a time capsule revealing everything that was wrong (and right) about 1980s geek culture.
There's a even a tip of the hat to David Cronenberg's Videodrome when the guy playing Centipede is yanked inside the TV set by an armored insect tentacle. Also note the attempt to make the ad feel like music videos did in the early MTV days, full of random clips from old movies and strange juxtopositions. Though I never saw this commercial when I was a kid in the 80s, it's so powerfully evocative of that time that I got a sudden rush of memories about what it was like to play Centipede all day at the air-conditioned movie theater, eating sugary crap and flirting with boys so they would give me passwords to their BBSes.
