| Berzerk | |
|---|---|
North American cover of the Atari 2600 version of the game |
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| Developer(s) | Stern Electronics |
| Publisher(s) | Stern Electronics |
| Designer(s) | Alan McNeil |
| Platform(s) | Arcade game, Atari 2600, Atari 5200, GCE Vectrex |
| Release date(s) | 1980 (Arcade) 1982 (CE Vectrex) August 1982 (Atari 2600) 1983 (Atari 5200) |
| Genre(s) | Multi-directional shooter/Run and gun |
| Mode(s) | Up to 2 players, alternating turns |
| Cabinet | Horizontal |
| CPU | Z80 2.50 MHz |
| Sound | TSI S14001A ~20 kHz (Variable), M6840 PTM 5.0 MHz |
| Display | Raster, standard resolution (Used: 256 x 224), 16 colors, 19 inch |
Berzerk is a multi-directional shooter video arcade game, released in 1980 by Stern Electronics of Chicago.
Contents |
The player controls a green stick-figure, representing a "humanoid." Using a joystick (and a firing button to activate a laser-like 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, coming into contact with 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. Otto is unusual, with regard to games of the period, in that there is no way to kill him. Otto can go through walls with impunity and is attracted to 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 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. Ideally, all the robots in the current maze have been destroyed before the player escapes, thus gaining the player a per-maze bonus (ten points per robot). The game has 64,000 mazes, and each level is designed to be more difficult to finish than the last. It has only one controller, but two-player games can be accomplished by alternating at the joystick.
The game is most difficult when the player enters a new maze, as there is only a short interval between entering the maze and all the robots in range firing at the player. For the beginner, this often means several deaths in rapid succession, as each death means starting a new maze layout.
Another memorable feature is the action of the robots—unlike adversaries in most other contemporary games, Berzerk's robots are known for being noticeably "stupid," killing themselves by running into walls or each other, shooting each other, or colliding with Evil Otto. Since they shoot from the right and from the top, it is advantageous to shoot them from around walls coming from the left or from the bottom. This creates a substantial disadvantage for the second player for beginning players, since the second player starts on the right side of the screen. This can be corrected by exiting top or bottom on the first screen and then exiting right on the 2nd screen. From then on, the second player can go left to right like the first player starts out. Anybody who can get through the second screen without losing a life consistently and who understands the left-to-right advantage no longer has a disadvantage for starting second. Thus, in championship play, a 2-player game can be used without problem.
Two different versions of the game were released. 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 (once they reach the limit, they cannot fire again until one or more of their bullets detonates; the limit applies to the robots as a group, not as individuals). In the original version, the sequence goes:
In this version of the game, after 5,000 points, Evil Otto doubles his speed, moving as fast as the player while robots remain in the maze, and twice as fast as the player after all the robots are destroyed.
The revised version, which had the much larger production run of the two, features a longer color sequence after the cyan robots:
To balance the greatly increased threat from the robots in the second version, Evil Otto's pursuit speed remains at its normal level—half or equal the player's speed—throughout.
In both versions, a free man can be awarded at 5,000 and/or 10,000 points, set by internal DIP switches.
Alan McNeil, 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. This dream, with heavy borrowing from the BASIC game Robots (Daleks in the UK), was the basis for Berzerk, which was named for Fred Saberhagen's Berserker series of science fiction novels.[1]
"Evil Otto" was named for Dave Otto, security chief at McNeil's former employer Dave Nutting Associates. According to McNeil, Otto would, "[smile] while he chewed you out."[2] 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.[1]
The idea for a black-and-white game was abandoned when the color game Defender was released earlier the same year to significant success. At that point Stern decided to use a color overlay board for Berzerk. 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.
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.
The game units were particularly known for failure of the optical 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.
Probably the best-remembered feature of Berzerk is that the robots talk. This was one of the first video games to use speech synthesis.
In 1980 computer voice compression was extremely expensive—estimates were that this cost the manufacturer US$1,000 per word; the English version had a thirty-word vocabulary. Stern nevertheless did not spare this expense, and some non-English versions were made, for example a Spanish version in which the robots would say "Intruso alerta" and "El humanoide no debe escapar."
The game's voice synthesizer generates speech for the robots during certain in-game events:
There is also random robot chatter playing in the background, phrases usually consisting of "Charge", "Attack", "Kill", "Destroy", 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.
Berzerk was officially ported to the Atari 2600, Atari 5200, and Vectrex. The Atari 2600 version features an option in which Evil Otto could be temporarily killed (he always returns). The Atari 5200 version is the only home version to include digitized speech, though the 2600 version was hacked to include speech in 2002.[3]
A portable version of Berzerk was planned by Coleco (similar in design to their Pac-Man, Frogger, etc. line of VFD tabletop games), but was never released.[4]
Stern later released a similar game called Frenzy as a sequel, and a Berzerk coin-op can be converted to Frenzy simply by replacing one processor (ZPU-1000 to ZPU-1001) and installing a different game ROM. The game also served as an inspiration for later, more sophisticated games such as Castle Wolfenstein, Shamus, Robotron: 2084, and Xybots.
Milton-Bradley produced a Berzerk board 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.
Robot Attack was an early clone of Berzerk written for the TRS-80 by the small company Big Five software. It also featured digitized speech.
Talking Android Attack is a clone of Berzerk for the Dragon 32 and Tandy Color Computer, marketed in the UK by Microdeal. As the name implies, it features several speech clips, including "intruder alert" and "I'll get you next time".
Cybermen is a Berzerk-style game released for the Commodore 64 in 1983.[5][6]
Cybertron Mission (Micro Power) for the BBC Micro, Acorn Electron and Commodore 64 from 1984 was heavily influenced by Berzerk.
The world record high score for the Arcade version of Berzerk (fast bullets setting) is 350,340 by Steve Wagner of the USA.[7]
While playing at the "E for All" event in the Los Angeles Convention Center on October 4, 2008, Phil Younger, of Whittier, USA, scored 401,130 points on the slow bullet version of Berzerk, beating the long-standing world record of 178,500 points logged by Ron Bailey of Shelby, USA, on August 30, 1982. With Twin Galaxies founder Walter Day in attendance as the official referee, Younger's gameplay employed the controversial "box pattern," which was described in Chasing Ghosts: Beyond the Arcade, a documentary film screened at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival. The film featured Berzerk rivals, Ron Bailey, Chris Ayra and Joel West who argued the relative merits of using the box pattern. Bailey and West were among a select group of video game superstars who posed for a famous LIFE Magazine group photo at Twin Galaxies in Ottumwa, Iowa on November 7, 1982. This group photograph was the subject of Chasing Ghosts, which followed the lives of these gamers and, in part, focused on Bailey and West as they discussed their plans to win back the Berzerk crown from Chris Ayra.
Berzerk was the first video game known to have been involved in the death of a player. In January 1981, 19-year-old Jeff Dailey died of a heart attack soon after posting a score of 16,660 on Berzerk.[8] In October of the following year, Peter Burkowski made the Berzerk top-ten list twice in fifteen minutes, just a few seconds before also dying of a heart attack at the age of 18.[9]
A Cracked.com article entitled "The 10 Most Terrifying Video Game Enemies of All Time" listed Evil Otto as number one, citing the two deaths attributed to the game and remarking that "he is possibly the only video game enemy in history to kill players in real-life" and "Evil Otto watched them die ... with a smile on his face."[10] In 2010 IGN Evil Otto was ranked 78th in "Top 100 Videogames Villains".
In 1982, Buckner and Garcia recorded a song titled "Goin' Berzerk", using sound effects from the game, and released it on the album Pac-Man Fever.[11]
1988 saw the release of the acid-house track Stakker Humanoid, which made prominent use of the "humanoid" and "intruder alert" samples and laser gunshot sound effects from the game. The track reached #1 on the UK Dance Chart that year, and came to be considered a classic of Rave history, as evidenced by the numerous remixes and compilation re-releases[12] in the years since; it has been described as a "hard techno anthem"[13] and an "international acid house hit"[14] in Mixmag.
Richard D. James recorded a track entitled "Humanoid Must Not Escape," which samples the eponymous robot quote, for alias Caustic Window's 1998 album Compilation.[15] James later reused samples from the video game in the song 54 Cymru Beats on his 2001 album Drukqs under his Aphex Twin alias.[16]
In the TV sitcom My Name is Earl (Season 1, episode 8), the character "Crabman" is portrayed, playing Berzerk and scoring high. He afterwards would take a polaroid photograph of the screen, pinning the highscore to his personal wall of fame.[17]
In the Futurama episode "Fear of a Bot Planet", the robotic policemen along with the loudspeaker use the sound samples of "Get the humanoid!" and "Intruder alert! Intruder alert!" from the original game.[18] The episode "Anthology of Interest II" also references the style of the sound samples ("Fork 'em over! FORK 'EM OVER!").[19]
In the The Simpsons episode "Homer Goes to College", Homer visits some nerds who mutter "Intruder alert" and "Stop the humanoid".[20]
In the NewsRadio episode "Rosebowl", news director Dave Nelson introduces an unpopular new employee evaluation system. In the fracas following the adoption of this new system, Dave is referred to as "Evil Otto" by the two news anchors, Bill McNeal and Catherine Duke.[21]
In the popular online game World of Warcraft, Gnomish Alarm-O-Bots call out "Intruder Alert!" when attacked in the same robotic voice as Evil Otto.