Berzerk (video game)

Berzerk
Arcade flyer
Developer(s)	Stern Electronics
Publisher(s)	Stern Electronics
Designer(s)	Alan McNeil
Platform(s)	Arcade, Atari 2600, Atari 5200, Vectrex
Release	Arcade December 1980 Atari 2600 August 1982 Vectrex October 1982 Atari 5200 February 1984
Genre(s)	Maze, shooter
Mode(s)	1-2 players alternating turns

Berzerk is a video game designed by Alan McNeil and released for arcades in 1980 by Stern Electronics of Chicago. The game involves a Humanoid Intruder who has to escape maze-like rooms that are littered with robots that slowly move towards and shoot at the Humanoid. The player can shoot at the robots to try and escape the room. Along with the robots, a smiley face known as Evil Otto appears to hunt down the player within each room.

Following a task to fix some technical problems on boards, Stern allowed McNeil to develop his own game. He slowly developed a game initially with robots, later adding the walls and the Evil Otto character to expand on the gameplay. After the company was visited by a salesperson promoting a "speech chip", McNeil took the offer and incorporated digitized voices in the game that taunt the player during game play and attract mode. Along with games like Stratovox (1980), it was one of the earliest games to feature speech synthesis in arcade games.

Stern premiered the game at the Amusement & Music Operators Association (AMOA) exposition in Chicago in late 1980. On its public release, the arcade game shifted over 50,000 units; an amount that Craig Grannell of Retro Gamer described as a "massive achievement."^[1] The game went on to receive ports for the Atari 2600, Atari 5200 and the Vectrex home consoles. The ports of the game were generally received well by the video game press, with the Atari 2600 port of the game winning a Certificate of Merit award for "Best Solitaire Videogame" from Electronic Games.

McNeil would develop a sequel titled Frenzy (1982). Berzerk was influential on later games such as Robotron: 2084 (1982). The game would appears on various "best of" lists and articles from publications like Flux in 1995, GameSpy in 2002, and Retro Gamer in 2008.

Berzerk is a one or two-player game.^[2] Darran Jones of Retro Gamer retrospectively described its genre as both a maze and shooter.^[3] The object of Bezerk is to have the Humanoid Intruder shoot as many robots as possible and escape a maze-like room.^[4][5] At the beginning of each room, the humanoid appears at the middle of one of the four edges and can escape through the exits on another side of the area.^[6]

The rooms are littered with robots that move slowly and periodically shoot at the player. The robots can fire in eight directions.^[5] The player shoots in the direction of the joystick in one of the eight directions the joystick is placed in. The joystick also controls the Humanoid intruder's movement. The player cannot move while firing.^[4] Bonus points are awarded when each room full of robots is destroyed.^[4] A smiley face known as "Evil Otto" will enter from where the Humanoid entered a room eventually and cannot be destroyed. Evil Otto can move through walls and follows the Humanoid Intruder trying to defeat it.^[4] Being shot by the robots, touching a maze wall, or having the Intruder touch either Evil Otto or a robot will result in the player losing a life.^[5]

DIP switches are available in the arcade machine for the operator to adjust some gameplay elements. This allows options to allow the player to get an extra life at 5,000 points, 10,000 points or not at all.^[7] By 1981, two models of Berzerk existed. The first featured three different coloured robots, with the yellow robots who do not shoot bullets, red robots that fire one shot at a time, and white robots that shoot two shots at a time. The next model, featured all the previous robots, as well as purple robots that could shoot three or five shots at a time, yellow robots that shoot four shots at a time, and a white robot that can shoot one very fast shot.^[8]

Alan McNeil developed Berzerk for Stern Electronics. McNeil enjoyed games like Stratego and Mille Bornes when younger, he began being interested in network-based video games through the PLATO compute system. After college, he made some games on his Sol-20 terminal computer, such as an adaptation of the game Robots.^[9] Robots was a game developed in BASIC that McNeil recalled seeing in an issue of Byte magazine.^[10] McNeil found work at Dave Nutting Associates. After being denied a request to make a video game for the company, he began looking for work elsewhere.^[1]

McNeil found new work at Stern Electronics in 1979 with the promise that after he could fix a problem on a Bally controller board, he could develop a video game.^[10][11] Stern was starting to get involved in arcade games, which led to McNeil doing the artwork, graphics design, programming and debugging of the game himself. ^[12] He quickly developed a prototype of the game on his Tektronix development system. The first prototype of the game was influenced by Robots.^[10] McNeil borrowed elements from the game such as the theme of robots on a task to kill the player and the robots vanishing if they crashed into each other. He used Fred Saberhagen's series Berserker for the title of the game.^[10] The novels are about robot war machines that are out to kill all biological life forms.^[11] He said in an interview that developing the concept for the game was simple, but described all tasks after as "drudge work", saying it took no less than 33 separate programs to make Berzerk work.^[11]

He wanted games the average game to have beginner players last about three minutes. McNeil described his initial version as having the robots move too fast which made the game become "too hard, even with just six robots, the game favored the robots too much - they would crash into each other occasionally, but the average game time on one life was about six seconds - not good."^[10] He would tweak these characters speeds and later adjusted the number of bullets the robots could shoot when entering a new room.^[13] The walls in the rooms in the game are not entirely random, which McNeil felt was not immersive. He developed the game so that rooms had a seed generator based on certain x and y co-ordinates within the code.^[13]

As there initially was no incentive to move beyond a room once the robots were defeated, McNeil created the "Evil Otto" character, a bouncing happy face that was associated with the phrase of "Have a nice day".^[14] McNeil stated he despised the happy face icon and had that it's associated phrase was used by "people who didn't want you to have a nice day, but instead wanted to cover themselves in fake righteousness. So I showed it like it was: 'have a nice day while I beat you to death!'".^[14] He named the character after Nutting Associates security manager Mr. Otto, who enforced strict lunch hours at the company.^[14]

During the game, the enemy robots create audible threats, warnings, and insults to the players whether they fight or flee the room.^[15] McNeil said that the game originally had what he described as "pinball-type sounds".^[14] This was changed when a salesman visited during the development of the game, who was trying to sell a "speech chip" that was intended to assist people with visual impairments. McNeil said that the company was trying to expand into toys and games, and on finding that the voice sounded very robotic, he included it into Berzerk.^[16] The chip used custom hardware to make hisses and tones that could be assembled into words. All the computer could control was the word and the pitch. McNeil kept the phrases short and applied them to the game to taunt players. He also included phrases for attract mode.^[16]

The last major addition was in the final month of production to make the game in color instead of being black and white. The game was being made with transparent ink on the screen to make it appear to be in color.^[16] The engineers created a color overlay video layer, giving it four bits for colour.^[17]

Stern premiered the game at the Amusement & Music Operators Association (AMOA) exposition in Chicago which ran between October 31 to November 2, 1980.^[2][19] The show had a total attendance of 7,400 visitors.^[20] Cashbox reported that the show visitors would daily crowd into Berzerk's booth for a chance to play it.^[19] Early test models for Berzerk had large joysticks, which had to be replaced by standard one-inch-high models created by the Wico Corporation. McNeil said that they changed the joysticks as players were pulling down so hard on them, that the cabinet would tip onto them.^[17]

Berzerk began shipping publicly in December 1980.^[21] It released over 50,000 units; an amount that Grannell described as a "massive achievement."^[1] McNeil commented on this, stating that "some games would be played out in a month because kids would get easily bored with them, but they always came back to Berzerk. Pac-Man eventually spelled the end of Berzerk's dominance, but even then it was earning well for operators."^[17]

The success of Berzerk in arcades led to versions made for Atari consoles and the Vectrex.^[17] Berzerk was released for the Atari 2600 in August 1982, the Vectrex in October 1982, and the Atari 5200 in February 1984.^[22][23][18] The port for the Atari 2600 was developed by Dan Hitchens.^[24] McNeil disliked the ports, finding that the games looked cruder than the arcade original, and responded that "Stern Electronics had sold the rights to make the home game to Atari for 4 million dollars - intellectual property capitalism at its finest."^[17]

Tony Licata, David Pierson, and Dick Welu covered the arcade games presented at AMOA in Play Meter magazine. Pierson found Berzerk interesting and commented that the major hindrance on the game was the controls involving the player having to use joystick for both aiming and movement.^[27] Welu wrote that the Stern's game did not look attractive, it was still his vote for the best of the show. He complimented the inclusion of Evil Otto and concluded that "people won't be able to quit playing [Berzerk]."^[28] Licata listed Atari's Battlezone (1980) as his pick for the best in the show, while stating that Berzerk was another game that really stood out. He described the synthesized voices in the game and its attract mode as highlights while and praising the graphics, writing that they fit perfectly for the game without detracting from it.^[29]

An anonymous reviewer in Electronic Games wrote that following Atari's announcement to release a version of Berzerk for the Atari 2600, "skepticism ran rampant" that the arcade game would be hard to produce for the system, particularly concerning the poor critical reception for the Atari home console version of Pac-Man (1982).^[30] Reviews in the magazines Electronic Games, Electronic Fun with Computers & Games, The Video Game Update, JoyStik and Video Review all found the game strong port of the arcade game, with Electronic Games saying that it was "one of the best arcade-to-home translations any company has produced thus far."^{[30][31][32][33]} Electronic Fun with Computers & Games, Electronic Games and JoyStik all complimented the variety in the mazes in the games which added variety to the game.^[30][31][33] The Video Game Update also complimented the sounds and visuals, specifically when the Humanoid is electrified by robot fire or by walking into walls.^[32] While the Atari 2600 version was described as "generally well regarded" by Grannell, McNeil was not keen on the conversions, finding they lacked many of the original games refinements.^[1]

In the magazine TV Gamer, the publication did not include Berzerk as one of the best games for the Vectrex system while concluding that Berzerk translated "surprisingly well" as a Rasterscan despite Evil Otto not looking right, being mostly made up of straight lines.^[34] Video game critic Michael Blanchet found the visuals on the Atari 5200 version of the game as simple which he said he would normally criticize, but found them approrpriate for Berzerk. He found the main drawback was the Atari 5200 controller, which was not as responsive as it could be.^[35]

At the 1983 Arcade Awards from Electronic Games, along with Infiltrate (1982), the Atari VCS version of Berzerk won the Certificate of Merit award for "Best Solitaire Videogame", being beaten by the ColecoVision release of Donkey Kong (1981).^[36]

Brett Weiss of AllGame praised the original arcade game for its humor, long-term replayability and its difficulty.^[37] Weiss also gave a positive review of the 5200 port reiterating his points, while finding that the humanoid controlled a bit too slow.^[38] A review in Eurogamer for the arcade version said that the game lives up to its name, and that its "quintessential surrealism makes it almost impossible not to love the game, and any entertainment medium that makes its audience regularly laugh out loud is worth a place in the top 50."^[40] Computer and Video Games found that the game did not have a lot of variety, but was fun nonetheless.^[39] Matt Fox in his book The Video Games Guide (2012) gave the game three stars finding the graphics "simple but effective" and that it was satisfying to have the robots chase you blindly only to destroy themselves against the walls of the maze.^[41]

In 1995, Flux magazine ranked the arcade version of Berzerk at 55th place on their list of the top 100 video games of all time.^[42] In their "Hall of Fame" article on the game, William Cassidy of GameSpy highlighted that the digitized speech as innovative and complimented the games personality.^[5][43] He found the game tapped into a science fiction and horror archetype which was only presented better in Robotron: 2084 (1982) and declared that Evil Otto was one of the greatest video game villains of all time.^[43] IGN echoed this, stating that while the character was generally unknown to a younger generation of gamers, Evil Otto was one of the most well-known video game villains during the "Atari days".^[44]

In their list of the top 25 Atari 2600 games in 2008, Stuart Hunt and Darran Jones of Retro Gamer included Berzerk on their list.^[45][46] The reviewers commented that it was the best "run-'n'-gun'" game on the Atari 2600 and complimented the animation in the game, specifically the rotating eyes of the cycloptic robots as "menacing and really instilled a feeling that they're scanning the room for a fleshy to kill."^[46]

On April 3, 1982, an 18-year-old male entered Friar Tuck's Game Room in Calumet City, Illinois. After playing Berzerk he collapsed and was pronounced dead the same day.^[47] Reports in newspapers suggested that officials were investigating if the player's heart attack was due to the stress endured while playing a video game.^[48] Mark Allen, the deputy coroner said that the autopsy found was due to scar tissue on the heart which was at least two weeks old, and said that "it's possible that the stress of the games triggered the attack in Peter's weakened heart."^[47] The owner of the Friar Tuck's, Tom Blankly said that the player's heart "had a Time Bomb in it that just happened to go off here. I expected it to hurt business, but if anything, business has been up."^[47]

Rumours spread since the death of the player that other players had died since playing Berzerk, which McNeil denied. McNeil responded that the owner of Friar Tucks said that the player ran up the stairs to play the game, was out of breath the moment he arrived and collapsed before even finishing his game.^[17]

Along with Stratovox (1980) and Taskete (1980), Berzerk was one of the earliest examples of speech synthesis in arcade games.^[1][49] Video game critic Michael Blanchet said Berzerk was one of the first games to combine shoot 'em up with maze game mechanics and the first to be a "not-so-cute maze game, and it is still the best."^[35] Berzerk had influenced various video games following its release such as Eugene Jarvis' Robotron: 2084. Jarvis described Berzerk as being "amazing" and on discovering that if you held down the shooting button, the player would not move, but could still change the direction they fired their weapon. This led him to design Robotron: 2084 as a game where a second joystick would control the direction of firing the bullets.^[50] McNeil said "I talked to [the developers of the Robotron: 2084] Eugene Jarvis and Larry DeMar when I was considering working for Williams. They are both great guys. I remember Eugene saying that Berzerk irritated them and they wanted to modify it to include some tougher situations. That was the itch they scratched for Robotron. I'm the same way. Something will irritate me and I'll want to improve it or redesign it."^[51] Berzerk was also described by authors of Vintage Games (2009) as the unstated inspiration for Castle Wolfenstein (1981).^[52] McNeil's game also had various clone games, such as Thief (1981).^[53]

Mike Mika developed a Atari 2600 homebrew version of Berzerk which included the digitized voice that was initially made available in 2002.^[54][55] Mika stated that the original game was of his favorite games for the system and when teaching himself how to program for the Atari 2600, he began adjusting palette colors in the games and began testing audio and to apply to it.^{[56] [57][58]} Other members of the Atari homebrew community such as Dennis Debro dissembled the original game and found code for the robots to shoot diagonally like in the arcade game, which was later added to Berzerk: Enhanced.^[59] Berzerk: Enhanced was released as a physical Atari 2600 cartridge by Atari in 2023.^[60]

McNeil said he left Stern following a stressful period where he was in charge of eight programmers, was interviewed during a period where items were being stolen from the company, and that on asking for a raise from his boss, received a response that "the designer of Space Invaders (1978) had merely 'got a watch and liked it' and said [McNeil] should do the same."^[61] Before quitting, he was offered one last project to make a sequel to Berzerk. As he had leftover ideas that did not make it into the original game, McNeil accepted and developed the game.^[62] Following Berzerk, McNeil made a handful of other games before focusing on work in animation programming.^[51] He died in 2017 of a heart attack.^[63]

In 2023, Atari, Inc. announced that they have acquired the rights to Stern's arcade games, including Berzerk.^[64] Sneakybox developed a new Berzerk game titled Berzerk: Recharged (2023) that was published by Atari as part of their Atari Recharged series.^[65][66] Berzerk was re-released as downloadable content for the Atari 50 (2022) compilation, which included the arcade version, the 5200 version, and both the original and voice-enhanced versions for the Atari 2600.^[67]

• Golden age of arcade video games

• Berzerk at Killer List of Videogames
• Berzerk at GameFAQs
• Berzerk at Giant Bomb