Berzerk talked. Walk a stick man into one of its maze rooms and the robots announce him: “Destroy the intruder”, “The humanoid must not escape”. Run out of a room without finishing them off and one of the survivors shouts after you, “Chicken! Fight like a robot!” Stern Electronics put it in American arcades in 1980, and for players of the time the voice was as much the game as the shooting. Its designer, Alan McNeil, built it from a dream, a BASIC game in Byte and a lasting dislike of the smiley face.
The game
You control a green stick figure in a room with an exit in each wall and a handful of robots. The robots shoot at you, and so can you, in eight directions. The walls are electrified, so touching one kills you, and the same goes for the robots: McNeil electrified them “to make them deadly for both players and robots”. Robots also blow themselves up by colliding with each other or the walls, and good players learn to make them do it.
Leave the room and you are in the next one. McNeil wanted the maze to feel like a real place, so it is not random. He used each room’s position as a 16-bit number to seed the maze generator, so “you could exit, run back and see the same room. It makes the universe more real”. Edge put the size of the maze at 64,000 rooms.
The robots get angrier as you go. McNeil made the game count the rooms you had cleared and used that count to set how many shots the robots could fire, so “it seemed like the robots were going from peeved to angry to berserk with rage”. They change colour as they get more dangerous, and their eyes spin faster.
Linger in a room and Evil Otto arrives: a bouncing yellow smiley face that comes straight for you through the walls and cannot be shot. McNeil added him because the early versions let players stand still in an empty room for as long as they liked. “This was in the era of the smiley face, that obnoxious yellow circle with the two black dots for eyes,” he told Edge. “I really despised it… I decided to show it like it was: ‘Have a nice day while I beat you to death’.” The name was a pun on “evil auto” and a dig at a Mr Otto, a security manager at McNeil’s previous employer, who had once locked the engineers out at lunchtime.
Where it came from
McNeil had studied architecture, industrial design and computer art, and had used the PLATO network of graphics terminals at college. He worked at Bally/Midway’s Dave Nutting Associates, where he was told he lacked the experience to design his own game, and moved to Stern as a pinball programmer, on condition that he could make a video game once the pinball work was done.
His starting point, he told Retro Gamer, was a BASIC game called Robots, which he had first seen in Byte and played on his Altair: a plus sign for the player and a crowd of letter O robots that closed in by the shortest path. What he took from it was the robots’ habit of crashing into each other: “vicious robots that were so single-minded about killing you that they didn’t watch out for each other”. The title is a nod to Fred Saberhagen’s Berserker science-fiction stories.
Then came the dream: “a black-and-white videogame with a stick-figure man and lots of robots closing in on him”. The first version did exactly that and was far too hard. “The average game time, one life, was about six seconds. Not good.” McNeil’s rule was that a beginner should get about three minutes for a quarter, which he worked out from the price of a cinema ticket. Lasers for the player, walls to break up the robots’ lines of fire, and robots whose aim was “just barely good enough to hit you” got it there. Colour came in the last month: the engineers added a coarse colour layer over the black-and-white picture, with each colour cell covering four by four pixels, which McNeil called “kludge kolor”.
The voice
The speech arrived by chance. A salesman visited Stern with a speech chip designed to help blind people. It could say only a fixed set of words, about 20 according to Retro Gamer and around 24 according to Edge, chosen when the chip was ordered; the program picked a word and a pitch and waited for it to finish. MAME’s emulation of the game identifies the chip as Telesensory Systems’ S14001A.
McNeil wanted the robots “to sound like they were hunting you”, and built sentences from a killing verb and a name for the player: “intruder”, “humanoid”, and, after one tester kept running through rooms without shooting anything, “chicken”. With a word or two to spare he added “Coin detected in pocket” to the attract mode. “One bar patron actually asked me how the game knew that he still had some quarters — and he played until he didn’t have quarters, to find out!”
Success, and a death
Berzerk was a hit. McNeil told Retro Gamer that Stern ran extra shifts to meet demand and that operators liked it because players kept coming back to it, until Pac-Man took over. The magazine put sales at more than 50,000 cabinets. He signed the cabinet, too: it reads “Designed and programmed by” above his signature.
The game is also remembered for a death. On 3 April 1982 Peter Burkowski, an 18-year-old student, entered his initials twice in the top-ten table of a Berzerk machine at Friar Tuck’s Game Room in Calumet City, Illinois, walked to another machine and collapsed. He died of a heart attack. Video Games reported that the autopsy found scar tissue on his heart at least two weeks old, and the deputy coroner thought the stress of playing might have triggered the attack in an already weakened heart. Stories have since grown up of two Berzerk deaths; McNeil told Retro Gamer that only one player died.
Home versions and Frenzy
Atari bought the home rights. McNeil, who had no part in the conversions, recalled being told that Stern sold them for $4 million. Atari’s 2600 version came out in 1982; the Retro Gamer Atari Book notes that it let players shoot Evil Otto. The 5200 version kept the voices without any add-on, which surprised Video Games Player: “who could imagine playing Berzerk without that sinister voice hurling insults at you?” There was also a Vectrex version.
McNeil’s follow-up, Frenzy, was in arcades by the summer of 1982. Video Games asked whether it was “the real Berzerk Deluxe”: it had walls that bounced shots back or could be shot away, and an Otto who “can and will be had”.
Berzerk also irritated two designers at Williams. McNeil remembered Eugene Jarvis telling him “that Berzerk irritated them and they wanted to modify it to include some tougher situations. That was the itch they scratched for Robotron.”
Sources
- Edge issue 225, March 2011, pp. 112–115: “The Making of… Berzerk”, interview with Alan McNeil (the dream; his education; Bally/Midway and Stern; the four passes; the three-minute rule; the fallible robots; the room seeds and the 64,000 mazes; the electrified walls; Evil Otto and the smiley; the speech chip, “intruder”, “human” and “chicken”; “Coin detected in pocket”; Eugene Jarvis and Larry DeMar).
- Retro Gamer issue 47, 2008, pp. 48–53: Craig Grannell, “The Making of: Berzerk”, interview with Alan McNeil (the phrases; PLATO and Dave Nutting Associates; Robots and Byte; Saberhagen; the six-second first pass; the maze scheme; the bullet count; Evil Otto’s name; the bow-tie trick; the speech chip of “about 20 fixed words”; the colour overlay; Stern’s extra shifts and sales of over 50,000; the signed cabinet; the $4 million home rights; the one death).
- Video Games volume 1 issue 2, October 1982, p. 14: “Death of a Video Gamer” (Peter Burkowski, Friar Tuck’s, the coroner’s findings).
- Video Games volume 1 issue 1, August 1982, p. 45: Frenzy strategy guide.
- Atari Age volume 1 issue 2, July 1982, p. 11: the 2600 version, “Created by Stern Electronics”.
- Retro Gamer: The Atari Book (Imagine, 2012), p. 119: the 2600 version (1982, Atari; Evil Otto can be destroyed).
- Video Games Player volume 3 issue 1, April 1984, p. 59: review of the 5200 version and its speech.
- MAME,
src/mame/stern/berzerk.cppandsrc/devices/sound/s14001a.cpp, driver and device source code (web, secondary): the Telesensory Systems S14001A speech chip. https://github.com/mamedev/mame/blob/master/src/mame/stern/berzerk.cpp