Under the Atarisoft label, the game was sold for the Apple II, Commodore 64, ColecoVision, VIC-20, IBM PC (as a self-booting disk), Intellivision, and TI-99/4A.

At higher levels, the screen can become increasingly crowded with mushrooms due to player/enemy actions, causing the centipede to descend more rapidly.

Spiders move across the player area in a zig-zag pattern and eat some of the mushrooms; they are worth 300, 600, or 900 points depending on the range they are shot from.

A centipede touching a poison mushroom will attack straight down toward the bottom, then return to normal behavior upon reaching it.

The Bug Blaster is destroyed when hit by any enemy, after which any poisonous or partially damaged mushrooms revert to normal.

[19] In 1983, Softline readers named Centipede ninth on the magazine's Top Thirty list of Atari 8-bit programs by popularity.

[21]: 28  David H. Ahl of Creative Computing Video & Arcade Games said that the Atari 5200 version was "delightful fun".

[24] In 1996, Next Generation listed the arcade version as number 84 on their "Top 100 Games of All Time", praising the cool concept, trackball control, and that it is accessible enough that "any human on the planet can play it well enough to enjoy it" yet "hard enough that even excellent gamers find it challenging".

[25] In 2020, The Strong National Museum of Play inducted Centipede to its World Video Game Hall of Fame.

[32][33][34] In 1998, after acquiring the intellectual property of Atari from then-owner JT Storage, Hasbro Interactive released a new version of the game for Microsoft Windows, PlayStation, Dreamcast, and Mac OS.

[35] A revamped version of the game, titled Centipede: Recharged, was released for Microsoft Windows, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, Google Stadia, and Atari VCS with exclusive content in September 2021 as part of the company's Atari Recharged series.

[52] In 1989, a deadpan narration describing the original game appeared on side 2 of Negativland's third cassette release, The Weatherman (SSTC902), which consists of clips from the Over the Edge radio show sometime between 1982 and 1984.

[55] Dynamite Entertainment started a limited run comic book series based on Centipede in July 2017.

[58] The world record score on the arcade version of Centipede was 16,389,547 points by Jim Schneider of the USA on August 1, 1984.

[59] Donald Hayes of Windham, New Hampshire, scored a world record 7,111,111 points under tournament rules on the arcade version of Centipede on November 5, 2000.