"Chicken, fight like a robot!" blares the cabinet speaker as I generously leave some killbots alive, moving on to the next room. There's no end to them: monochrome sentinels of death, all bunching up along the walls, all waiting to fire. I ready the ray-gun and trudge forward, fingers on the trigger, reflected through the joystick. This continues for untold iterations as the numbers go up, the Evil Otto bounces down upon its hapless allies, and the rhythm of combat multiplies. Everyone has their place here, the guards uncaring for their neighbors and the smiley-faced custodian uniquely aware of this realm's absurdity.
Ok, ok, it's Berzerk, and it's not that complex aside from catalyzing the deaths of two hapless players. Compared to both emerging maze games and shooters like Space Invaders, this one's appeal must have been immediate: unpredictable gunfights, a sassy robotic narrator, and more chaos than something as scandalous as Death Race could have imagined. The origins of the run 'n gun style arguably trace back farther to Tank and its clones, but changing out vehicles for humanoid avatars lets the pacing slacken and rev up more granularly. Crashing into electrified walls becomes more of a threat than colliding with far-off aggressors, who now threaten more with split-second lasers than an opposite player careening into you. So the dynamic's similar but different enough from the motion-full Asteroids, with danger coming from less angles but requiring quicker reactions.
What undoubtedly helped Berzerk survive its encounter with Williams' Defender is the touted "sense of humor" seen with Evil Otto and how it affects players and AI alike. After all, why risk visiting the next dungeon screen and quickly dying when one could just stay put, safe and sound? The danger and necessary push of Evil Otto remains one of the golden age's most iconic symbols, both scary and ironic. And it only gets better when a savvy player sicks the boisterous bounding ball on unsuspecting droids, racking up points while kiting Otto around each arena. Counting score by each enemy's death, rather than players' successful shots, was maybe the smartest move to extend the game's longevity. There's an upper human limit of how long someone's going to traverse one nondescript room after another, but surviving long enough to abuse this scoring mechanic? Why the hell not!
I'd much rather try and master Jarvis' side-scrolling shooter if I'm having to choose between these games (that, and Defender technically started location testing and initial distribution at the start of '81). But there's a simple charm to creator Alan McNeil's attempt at crossing genre lines, evoking the first dungeon crawlers without their labored pace of play. McNeil himself came up with Berzerk's premise based on his own nightmare of robots chasing him through hallways, let alone the memory of security browbeater David Otto haunting the designer from his time working with Dave Nutting Associates. [1] People always talk about how this game feels like wandering through a dreamscape they can't escape, and I think there's some truth to that. On the bright side, it's cool to see McNeil take the early micro-processor lessons learned with Midway's Gun Fight (a recreation of Taito's TTL-chip classic Western Gun). We're talking about the guy who later laid the foundation of Macromedia Director and other technology, so it's unsurprising he could get so much from basic hardware.
Juking bots with Otto and luring them into fences calls an earlier game to mind: CHASE, a derivation of a 1976 BASIC game where players have to crash pursuers into objects and each other [2]. This puts Berzerk in the same conversation as other PC-to-arcade transitional software; in fact, it's one of the earliest examples. It's fascinating how much Stern's 1980 smash success treads the line between hobbyist sleeper hit and a throwback to much earlier media like the Berserker novels and publications like Creative Computing. From here, the tendrils extend towards Robotron and its ilk, let alone a direct sequel in Frenzy. I may be moving on from this weird and seemingly simple curiosity, yet it's going to reappear in one form or another as the '80s arcade era marches on.
Bibliography
[1] Hunter, William. “Berzerk.” The Dot Eaters (blog). Accessed January 1, 2024. <https://thedoteaters.com/?bitstory=bitstory-article-2/berzerk>
[2] David, Ahl, and Cotter Bill. “Chase (High Voltage Maze) - Cotter.” Creative Computing, January 1976. Accessed via Internet Archive. <http://archive.org/details/Creative_Computing_v02n01_Jan-Feb1976> Retrieved on January 6, 2024.
Ok, ok, it's Berzerk, and it's not that complex aside from catalyzing the deaths of two hapless players. Compared to both emerging maze games and shooters like Space Invaders, this one's appeal must have been immediate: unpredictable gunfights, a sassy robotic narrator, and more chaos than something as scandalous as Death Race could have imagined. The origins of the run 'n gun style arguably trace back farther to Tank and its clones, but changing out vehicles for humanoid avatars lets the pacing slacken and rev up more granularly. Crashing into electrified walls becomes more of a threat than colliding with far-off aggressors, who now threaten more with split-second lasers than an opposite player careening into you. So the dynamic's similar but different enough from the motion-full Asteroids, with danger coming from less angles but requiring quicker reactions.
What undoubtedly helped Berzerk survive its encounter with Williams' Defender is the touted "sense of humor" seen with Evil Otto and how it affects players and AI alike. After all, why risk visiting the next dungeon screen and quickly dying when one could just stay put, safe and sound? The danger and necessary push of Evil Otto remains one of the golden age's most iconic symbols, both scary and ironic. And it only gets better when a savvy player sicks the boisterous bounding ball on unsuspecting droids, racking up points while kiting Otto around each arena. Counting score by each enemy's death, rather than players' successful shots, was maybe the smartest move to extend the game's longevity. There's an upper human limit of how long someone's going to traverse one nondescript room after another, but surviving long enough to abuse this scoring mechanic? Why the hell not!
I'd much rather try and master Jarvis' side-scrolling shooter if I'm having to choose between these games (that, and Defender technically started location testing and initial distribution at the start of '81). But there's a simple charm to creator Alan McNeil's attempt at crossing genre lines, evoking the first dungeon crawlers without their labored pace of play. McNeil himself came up with Berzerk's premise based on his own nightmare of robots chasing him through hallways, let alone the memory of security browbeater David Otto haunting the designer from his time working with Dave Nutting Associates. [1] People always talk about how this game feels like wandering through a dreamscape they can't escape, and I think there's some truth to that. On the bright side, it's cool to see McNeil take the early micro-processor lessons learned with Midway's Gun Fight (a recreation of Taito's TTL-chip classic Western Gun). We're talking about the guy who later laid the foundation of Macromedia Director and other technology, so it's unsurprising he could get so much from basic hardware.
Juking bots with Otto and luring them into fences calls an earlier game to mind: CHASE, a derivation of a 1976 BASIC game where players have to crash pursuers into objects and each other [2]. This puts Berzerk in the same conversation as other PC-to-arcade transitional software; in fact, it's one of the earliest examples. It's fascinating how much Stern's 1980 smash success treads the line between hobbyist sleeper hit and a throwback to much earlier media like the Berserker novels and publications like Creative Computing. From here, the tendrils extend towards Robotron and its ilk, let alone a direct sequel in Frenzy. I may be moving on from this weird and seemingly simple curiosity, yet it's going to reappear in one form or another as the '80s arcade era marches on.
Bibliography
[1] Hunter, William. “Berzerk.” The Dot Eaters (blog). Accessed January 1, 2024. <https://thedoteaters.com/?bitstory=bitstory-article-2/berzerk>
[2] David, Ahl, and Cotter Bill. “Chase (High Voltage Maze) - Cotter.” Creative Computing, January 1976. Accessed via Internet Archive. <http://archive.org/details/Creative_Computing_v02n01_Jan-Feb1976> Retrieved on January 6, 2024.