The green player has just entered a room with five red robots (arcade).
When the game begins, the player controls a green stick man on the left of the screen. In two-player games, the second player controls a purple stick man on the right of the screen. Each player plays until they lose a life, allowing the other player to have a turn.
Using a joystick and a firing button that activates a laser-style weapon, the player navigates a simple maze filled with many robots, who fire lasers back at the player character. A player can be killed by being shot, by running into a robot or an exploding robot, getting electrocuted by the electrified walls of the maze itself, or by being touched by the player's nemesis, Evil Otto.
The function of Evil Otto, represented by a bouncing smiley face, is to quicken the pace of the game.[3] Otto is unusual, with regard to games of the period, in that he's indestructible. Otto can go through walls with impunity and hunts the player character. If robots remain in the maze Otto moves slowly, about half as fast as the humanoid, but he speeds up to match the humanoid's speed once all the robots are killed. Evil Otto moves at exactly the same speed as the player going left and right but he can move faster than the player going up and down; thus, no matter how close Otto is, the player can escape as long as they can avoid moving straight up or down.
The player advances by escaping from the maze through an opening in the far wall. Each robot destroyed is worth 50 points. If all the robots in the current maze have been destroyed before the player escapes, the player gains ten points per robot. The game has 65,536 rooms (256×256 grid), but due to limitations of the random number generation there are fewer than 1,024 maze layouts (876 of which are unique). It has only one controller, but two-player games can be accomplished by alternating at the joystick.[4]
As a player's score increases, the colors of the enemy robots change, and the robots can have more bullets on the screen at the same time.[3] Once they reach the limit of simultaneous on-screen bullets, they cannot fire again until one or more of their bullets detonates; the limit applies to the robots as a group, not as individuals.
A free life can be awarded at 5,000 or 10,000 points, set by internal DIP switches, with no extra lives thereafter.
The game's voice synthesizer generates speech for the robots during certain in-game events:
"Coin detected in pocket": During attract mode, specifically while showing the high score list.
"Intruder alert! Intruder alert!": Spoken when Evil Otto appears.
"The humanoid must not escape" or "The intruder must not escape": Heard when the player escapes a room after destroying every robot.
"Chicken, fight like a robot": Heard when the player escapes a room without destroying every robot.
"Got the humanoid, got the intruder!": Heard when the player loses a life (the "got the intruder" part is a minor third higher than the "got the humanoid" part).
There is random robot chatter playing in the background, with phrases usually consisting of "Charge", "Attack", "Kill", "Destroy", "Shoot", or "Get", followed by "The Humanoid", "The intruder", "it", or "the chicken" (the last only if the player got the "Chicken, fight like a robot" message from the previous room), creating sentences such as "Attack it", "Get the Humanoid", "Destroy the intruder", "Kill the chicken", and so on. The speed and pitch of the phrases vary, from deep and slow, to high and fast; as well as different versions of the game being translated into four different languages such as English, French, German, and Spanish.
Development
Alan McNeil (1951–2017),[5] an employee of Universal Research Laboratories (a division of Stern Electronics), had a dream one night involving a black-and-white video game in which he had to fight robots. It was named for Fred Saberhagen's Berserker series of science fiction novels.[6]
"Evil Otto" was named after Dave Otto at McNeil's former employer Dave Nutting Associates. According to McNeil, Dave Otto would "[smile] while he chewed you out".[7] He would also lock McNeil and his fellow employees out of the building to enforce a noon-hour lunch, as well as piping beautiful music into every room.[6]
The idea for a black-and-white game was abandoned. At that point Stern decided to use a color overlay board for Berzerk.[8] A quick conversion was made, and all but the earliest versions of the game shipped with a color CRT display. The game was test-marketed successfully at a Chicago singles bar before general release.
Technology
The game was originally planned around a Motorola 6809E processor, but problems with the external clock for this CPU led to its abandonment in favor of a Zilog Z80.[8]
The game suffered from failure of the optical 8-way joystick unit; Stern suffered the cancellation of about 4,200 orders for new games because of previous purchasers' bad experiences with these joysticks. The company responded by issuing free replacement joysticks in a leaf-switch design by Wico.[8]
Berzerk is one of the first video games to use speech synthesis, featuring talking robots.[3] In 1980, computer voice compression was extremely expensive, estimated to have cost the manufacturer US$1,000 (equivalent to $3,700in 2023) per word;[8] the English version has a thirty-word vocabulary.
Ports
Berzerk was officially ported to the Atari 2600, Atari 5200, and Vectrex. The Atari 2600 version has an option allowing Evil Otto to be temporarily killed, though he always returns. The Atari 5200 version was the only home version to include digitized speech, until the release of the Atari 2600+ edition in 2023.
A port for the Atari 8-bit computers, identical to the Atari 5200 version, was ready in 1983, but was not published.[9]
A portable version of Berzerk was planned by Coleco, similar in design to its line of VFD tabletop games including Pac-Man and Frogger, but was never released.[10]
Atari released an enhanced version of Berzerk[11] to coincide with the new Atari 2600+ console that went on sale in November 2023.[12][13] As well as the digitized speech, which can only play when the screen is blanked due to hardware limitations, the enhanced version allows robots to shoot diagonally—something they could not do in the original Atari 2600 game. The enhanced Berzerk game is also compatible with the original Atari 2600 and Atari 7800.
Reception
This section needs expansion. You can help by adding to it. (October 2017)
Ed Driscoll reviewed Berzerk in The Space Gamer No. 56.[14] Driscoll commented that "if you liked Berzerk, or if you simply enjoy shooting evil robots in electrified mazes, then look for this at your local store. But watch out for Evil Otto!"[14] Michael Blanchet's 1982 book How to Beat the Video Games compared Berzerk favourably to older, Western-themed multi-directional shooters Boot Hill (a sequel to Gun Fight) and Bandido (the North American rebranding of Sheriff).[15] The Atari 2600 version received a Certificate of Merit in the category of "Best Solitaire Video Game" at the 4th annual Arkie Awards.[16]:30
Retrospective
Brett Weiss of AllGame gave the arcade version a review score of 4.5 out of 5 stars calling the Berzerk: "A great game that is immensely challenging and imminently replayable."[17] He also reviewed the Atari 5200 version and gave a review score of 4 out of 5 stars and praised the Atari port writing: "excellent job of recapturing the play mechanics and the voice feature."[18]
In 2010[19] Evil Otto was ranked 78th in "Top 100 Videogames Villains" by IGN.[20] In 1995, Flux magazine ranked the game 55th on their "Top 100 Video Games."[21]
Milton-Bradley produced a Berzerkboard game designed for two players, one playing Evil Otto and the robots, the other playing the hero. The playing pieces are plastic yellow rectangular panels that are labeled with the corresponding characters. The hero figure is differently shaped and labeled only on one side. It also has a slot in which a second piece is inserted representing the character's arms, both equipped with laser pistols. Pressing down on the back tab raises the guns and if the figure is properly positioned in the space, it knocks down a robot. Firing the weapon counts as one move.
In 1982, Stern released Frenzy as a sequel. A Berzerk arcade machine can be converted to Frenzy simply by replacing one processor (ZPU-1000 to ZPU-1001) and installing a different ROM.
In 2002, the Atari 2600 version was hacked to include speech.[23]
Berzerk was released for iOS in 2013 as part of the Vectrex Regeneration app.
An unofficial port for the NES was released by Parisoft in July 2019.[24]
In 1982, a player died from a heart attack while playing Berzerk, which has been cited as the first recorded case of a death caused by video gaming.[27] However, the incident has been mired in urban legend, with accounts varying as to how many people died (ranging one to three), when the death occurred (while playing Berzerk or after moving on to another cabinet), and whether or not the victim was showing signs of stress before playing the game. The coroner ruled that the heart attack was caused by scarring of heart tissue which the victim would have had before playing the game, and that any form of exertion could have triggered the attack.[28]
Influence
The influence of Berzerk upon popular culture is marked by appearances of the game and samples of its media within television shows, music, and movies.[29][30][31][32][33][34] Several third-party clones of the original game exist, and the design of Shamus (1982) is greatly influenced by it.
The Atari 5200 SuperSystem or simply Atari 5200 is a home video game console introduced in 1982 by Atari, Inc. as a higher-end complement for the popular Atari Video Computer System. The VCS was renamed to the Atari 2600 at the time of the 5200's launch. Created to compete with Mattel's Intellivision, the 5200 wound up a direct competitor of ColecoVision shortly after its release. While the Coleco system shipped with the first home version of Nintendo's Donkey Kong, the 5200 included the 1978 arcade game Super Breakout which had already appeared on the Atari 8-bit computers and Atari VCS in 1979 and 1981 respectively.
Ms. Pac-Man is a 1982 maze arcade video game developed by General Computer Corporation and published by Midway. It is a spin-off sequel to Pac-Man (1980) and the first entry in the series to not be made by Namco. Controlling the title character, Pac-Man's wife, the player is tasked with eating all of the pellets in an enclosed maze while avoiding four colored ghosts. Eating the larger "power pellets" lets the player eat the ghosts, who turn blue and flee.
Robotron: 2084 is a multidirectional shooter developed by Eugene Jarvis and Larry DeMar of Vid Kidz and released in arcades by Williams Electronics in 1982. The game is set in the year 2084 in a fictional world where robots have turned against humans in a cybernetic revolt. The aim is to defeat endless waves of robots, rescue surviving humans, and earn as many points as possible.
Stern is the name of two different but related arcade gaming companies. Stern Electronics, Inc. manufactured arcade video games and pinball machines from 1977 until 1985, and was best known for Berzerk. Stern Pinball, Inc., founded in 1986 as Data East Pinball, is a manufacturer of pinball machines in North America.
1982 was the peak year for the golden age of arcade video games as well as the second generation of video game consoles. Many games were released that would spawn franchises, or at least sequels, including Dig Dug, Pole Position, Mr. Do!, Zaxxon, Q*bert, Time Pilot and Pitfall! The year's highest-grossing video game was Namco's arcade game Pac-Man, for the third year in a row, while the year's best-selling home system was the Atari 2600. Additional video game consoles added to a crowded market, notably the ColecoVision and Atari 5200. Troubles at Atari late in the year triggered the video game crash of 1983.
Kangaroo is a four-screen platform game released as an arcade video game 1982 by Sun Electronics and distributed in North America by Atari, Inc. Kangaroo is one of the first arcade games similar in style to Donkey Kong without being a direct clone. The player takes the role of a boxing glove-wearing mother kangaroo who is trying to rescue her joey from fruit-throwing monkeys. Jumping is integral to the game, but there is no jump button. Instead, the player pushes up on the joystick—or up and diagonally—to leap. The arcade version of Kangaroo has visible glitches in the graphics, such as sprites briefly flickering.
River Raid is a video game developed by Carol Shaw for the Atari Video Computer System and released in 1982 by Activision. The player controls a fighter jet over the River of No Return in a raid behind enemy lines. The goal is to navigate the flight by destroying enemy tankers, helicopters, fuel depots and bridges without running out of fuel or crashing.
Super Cobra is a horizontally scrolling shooter developed by Konami, originally released as an arcade video game in 1981. It was published by Konami in Japan in March 1981 and manufactured and distributed by Stern in North America on June 22. It is the spiritual sequel to the Scramble arcade game released earlier in 1981. Super Cobra contains eleven distinct sections, versus six in Scramble, and is significantly more difficult, requiring maneuvering through tight spaces early in the game.
Frenzy is a multidirectional shooter arcade video game published by Stern Electronics in 1982. It is a sequel to 1980's popular Berzerk; both games were developed by Alan McNeil. Frenzy's gameplay is fundamentally similar to Berzerk—the player enters a series of maze-like rooms containing armed robots and must shoot them to survive—but adds more variety. Ports were released for ColecoVision and ZX Spectrum.
Vanguard is a scrolling shooter arcade video game developed by TOSE. It was released by SNK in Japan and Europe 1981, and licensed to Centuri for manufacture in North America in October and to Zaccaria in Italy the same year. Cinematronics converted the game to cocktail arcade cabinets in North America.
Tank is an arcade game developed by Kee Games, a subsidiary of Atari, and released in November 1974. It was one of the few original titles not based on an existing Atari property developed by Kee Games, which was founded to sell clones of Atari games to distributors as a fake competitor prior to the merger of the two companies. In the game, two players drive tanks through a maze viewed from above while attempting to shoot each other and avoid mines, represented by X marks, in a central minefield. Each player controls their tank with a pair of joysticks, moving them forwards and back to drive, reverse, and steer, and firing shells with a button to attempt to destroy the other tank. The destruction of a tank from a mine or shell earns the opposing player a point, and tanks reappear after being destroyed. The winner is the player with more points when time runs out, with each game typically one or two minutes long.
RealSports Football is a 1982 American football sports video game made by Atari, Inc. for the Atari 2600. Versions for the Atari 5200 and Atari 8-bit computers followed in 1983. It is part of the RealSports series of games.
Super Breakout is a sequel to the 1976 video game Breakout released in arcades in September 1978 by Atari, Inc. It was written by Ed Rotberg. The game uses the same mechanics as Breakout, but allows the selection of three distinct game modes via a knob on the cabinet—two of which involve multiple, simultaneous balls in play. Both the original and sequel are in black and white with monitor overlays to add color. It was distributed in Japan by Namco and Esco Trading.
Astro Chase is a multidirectional shooter written by Fernando Herrera for Atari 8-bit computers. It was published by First Star Software in 1982 as the company's first game. Parker Brothers licensed it, releasing cartridge versions for the Atari 8-bit family and Atari 5200 console in 1983 and a Commodore 64 version in 1984. Exidy licensed it for arcade use with its Max-A-Flex cabinet.
Escape from the Planet of the Robot Monsters is a multidirectional shooter released in arcades by Atari Games in 1989. The game is styled after campy science fiction B movies of the 1950s. It was ported to the Amiga, Amstrad CPC, Atari ST, Commodore 64, MS-DOS, SAM Coupé, and ZX Spectrum.
Towering Inferno is an Atari 2600 game designed by Jeff Corsiglia and programmed by Paul Allen Newell and released by US Games in 1982. The player controls a fireman going through a burning skyscraper to save victims and put out the fires. The game was produced under a licence obtained from 20th Century Fox by Quaker Oats, the parent company of US Games, for the video game rights to the movie of the same name.
Tutankham is a 1982 arcade video game developed and released by Konami and released by Stern in North America. Named after the Egyptian pharaoh Tutankhamun, the game combines a maze shoot 'em up with light puzzle-solving elements. It debuted at the European ATE and IMA amusement shows in January 1982, before releasing worldwide in Summer 1982. The game was a critical and commercial success and was ported to home systems by Parker Brothers.
Blue Print is an arcade maze game released in September 1982. It was developed by the Stamper brothers and licensed to Bally Midway. Ports of Blue Print were published by CBS Electronics for the Atari 2600, Atari 5200, and Commodore 64 in 1983.
K-Razy Shoot-Out is a clone of the arcade video game Berzerk developed by K-Byte, a division of Kay Enterprises, and released for Atari 8-bit computers in 1981. The game was written by Torre Meeder and Keith Dreyer, and was the first Atari 8-bit cartridge from a third-party developer. An Atari 5200 version followed in 1983. The team of Dreyer and Meeder also wrote the 1983 Atari 8-bit game Boulders and Bombs.
↑ Blanchet, Michael (1982). How to Beat the Video Games. New York: Simon and Schuster. pp.29–34. ISBN0671453750. p.29: Berzerk brings out the "Dirty Harry" (or "Annie Oakley") in all of us. If you feel you have outgrown Boot Hill and Bandito, then Berzerk is your game.
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