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Berzerk is a multi-directional shooter video arcade game, released in 1980 by Stern Electronics of Chicago.

Gameplay

The player controls a green stick man. Using a joystick and a firing button that activates 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 65,536 rooms (256x256 grid), but due to limitations of the random number generation there are fewer than 1024 maze layouts (876 unique). 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 second 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 two-player game can be used without problem.

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 of simultaneous onscreen 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.

Two different versions of the game were released. In the original version, the sequence goes as follows:

Dark yellow robots that do not fire
Red robots that can fire 1 bullet (500 points)
Dark cyan robots that can fire 2 bullets (1,500 points)

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:

Green robots that fire 3 bullets (3k)
Dark purple robots that fire 4 bullets (4.5k)
Light yellow robots that fire 5 bullets (6k)
White robots that fire 1 fast bullet (7.5k)
Dark cyan robots that fire 2 fast bullets (10k)
Light purple robots that fire 3 fast bullets (11k)
Gray robots that fire 4 fast bullets (13k)
Dark yellow robots that fire 5 fast bullets (15k)
Red robots that fire 5 fast bullets (17k)
Light cyan robots that fire 5 fast bullets (19k)

The game allows up to six shots on the screen at one time. This include the player, and five total from any robots at any one time.

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 or 10,000 points, set by internal DIP switches.

History

In the game, the player's objective is to destroy robots and navigate a maze of randomly generated rooms.

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.

"Evil Otto" was named after Dave Otto, security chief at McNeil's former employer Dave Nutting Associates. According to McNeil, Otto would, "[smile] while he chewed you out."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.

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.

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.

The game units were particularly known for 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.

Speech synthesis

Berzerk is notably one of the first video games to use speech synthesis, featuring talking robots. 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.

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 also random robot chatter playing in the background, 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.

The text for phrases like "Insert Coin," "Press Start," "High Scores" is in English, French, German and Spanish. MAME source code also shows those languages as DIP switch settings.

Ports

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, though he always returns. The Atari 5200 version is the only home version to include digitized speech, though the 2600 version was hacked in 2002 to include speech. A port for the Atari 8-bit family of computers, identical to the Atari 5200 version, was ready in 1983, but was not published.

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.

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.

In 1982, Stern released Frenzy as a sequel. A Berzerk coin-op can be converted to Frenzy simply by replacing one processor (ZPU-1000 to ZPU-1001) and installing a different ROM.

Berzerk was released for iOS in 2013 as part of the Vectrex Regeneration app.