Dona Bailey (born 1955) is an American video game programmer and educator. Bailey, along with Ed Logg in 1981, developed Atari, Inc.'s arcade video game Centipede. Early life and education Dona Bailey was born in 1955 in Little Rock, Arkansas. She graduated high school early and started attending the University of Arkansas at Little Rock at the age of 16. She accelerated her education by taking classes year-round and in the summer, and by the age of 19, she graduated with a bachelor's degree in Psychology with three minors in English, Math and Biology. She continued her education further by earning a master's degree in Math. Career As a young programmer, Bailey was hired by General Motors in 1978 and trained in assembly language programming. She worked there for two years on displays, and microprocessor-based cruise control systems. Bailey's first exposure to video games came from when she first heard the song "Space Invader" by The Pretenders. A friend told her the song was inspired by the arcade video game Space Invaders. After becoming interested in what a video game was, her friend took her to a nearby bar which had a Space Invaders arcade cabinet. Bailey noticed that the display on Space Invaders resembled the display she worked with on the Cadillac at GM. She later found out that Atari was using the same microprocessor in its games. This inspired her to leave GM and move to Sunnyvale, California with the intention of working for Atari. Atari In 1980, Bailey joined Atari's coin-op division, where she was the only woman. In an interview, Bailey recalled that Atari had a notebook of possible game ideas at the time. Of the 30 or so entries the only one without "lasering or frying things" was a short description of a bug winding down the screen. She said, "It didn't seem bad to shoot a bug". Within a four-person team, she became the software developer and software engineer on Centipede. Ed Logg, a supervisor at Atari at the time, assigned Bailey to do the programming on Centipede. Logg said he worked on the game's design, while Bailey did "about half the programming". Centipede went on to become Atari's second best-selling coin-op game. Due to the game's popularity, Atari's production line was forced to run two shifts to keep up with demand. Centipede was also one of the first coin-op based arcade machines to