It took a while before videogames began to worry about such 
things as "story" or "reason" - Pac-Man just eats ghosts in a maze, he doesn't have a backstory to tell you why you're there making him do it. If there was any lore to be gleaned from the games, it fell to the writers of the manuals or the artists of the cabinets to suggest something, often entirely independent from anyone who actually designed the game. And that's why in Centipede, depending on the port, you might be a high-tech soldier fighting alien bugs, a gnome protecting their garden, a travelling wizard in an enchanted forest, an evil wizard attempting to destroy the forest... or perhaps all of those rolled together in the weirdest mish-mash since monks with magic powers flew to their laser-fights in their space ships.
While the titular bug in the game was barely more than a series of dots (one style for the head, a second style for the body segments), the art on the side of the arcade cabinet made it look like some kind of fearsome monster, with claws and fangs, rearing up to attack. Like the other minis in this line, the Centipede figure is designed to match the promotional artwork rather than the digital, so that fearsome monster is what we get in plastic form. It has six arms, each with spiky ridges on the forearm and a lobster-like claw at the end. The mouth is open to reveal large white fangs and the forked red tongue sticking out. One antenna is angled higher than the other, matching the old drawing.
The side of the cabinet showed this beast weaving its way vertically 
through a series of mushrooms that were in the process of being blasted apart. Clearly that's a little more than a Mystery Mini can deliver, so while the face and arms are at least in a similar position, the body is just coiled around by itself, allowing the bug to rise up like a snake. The body is done as a series of segmented balls, with yellow for the belly, contrasting against the solid green of the rest of the body. This is the only Centipede figure in the series, so you didn't have to worry about the blind-boxing if you wanted to get it.
