BERZERK GAME PLAY

Berzerk is a one or two-player game. Darran Jones of Retro Gamer retrospectively described its genre as both a maze and shooter. The object of Berzerk is to have the Humanoid Intruder shoot as many robots as possible and escape a maze-like room. 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.

The rooms are littered with robots that move slowly and periodically shoot at the player. The robots can fire in eight directions. 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. Bonus points are awarded when each room full of robots is destroyed. 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. Being shot by the robots, touching a maze wall, or having the Humanoid Intruder touch either Evil Otto or a robot will result in the player losing a life.

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. 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.

BERZERK Game Release

Stern premiered the game at the Amusement & Music Operators Association (AMOA) exposition in Chicago which ran between October 31 and November 2, 1980. The show had a total attendance of 7,400 visitors. Cashbox reported that the show visitors wouldcrowd into Berzerk‘s booth daily for a chance to play it. 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.

Berzerk began shipping in November 1980, and Stern manufactured and sold around 15,000 units, which was a “sizable hit” for them. McNeil commented 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.”

The success of Berzerk in arcades led to versions made for Atari consoles and the Vectrex. Berzerk was released for the Atari 2600 in August 1982, the Vectrex in October 1982, and the Atari 5200 in February 1984. The port for the Atari 2600 was developed by Dan Hitchens. 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.”

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). Reviews in the magazines Electronic Games, Electronic Fun with Computers & Games, The Video Game Update, JoyStik and Video Review all found the game to be a 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.” Electronic Fun with Computers & Games, Electronic Games and JoyStik all complimented the different mazes in the games which added variety to the game. The Video Game Update also complimented the sounds and visuals, specifically when the Humanoid is electrified by robot fire or by walking into walls. While the Atari 2600 version was described as “generally well regarded” by Craig Grannell of Retro Gamer, McNeil was not keen on the conversions, finding they lacked many of the original game’s refinements.

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. 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.

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).

Brett Weiss of AllGame praised the original arcade game for its humor, long-term replayability and its difficulty. Weiss also gave a positive review of the 5200 port reiterating his points, while finding that the Humanoid controlled a bit too slow.  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.” Computer and Video Games found that the game did not have a lot of variety, but was fun nonetheless. 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.

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. In their “Hall of Fame” article on the game, William Cassidy of GameSpy highlighted that the digitized speech as innovative and complimented the game’s personality. 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. 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”.

Stuart Hunt and Darran Jones of Retro Gamer included Berzerk in their 2008 list of the top 25 Atari 2600 games. 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.”

INFAMOUS DEATH STORIES FROM PLAYING BERZERK

On April 3, 1982, 18-year-old Peter Burkowski entered Friar Tuck’s Game Room in Calumet City, Illinois. After playing and beating the high score in Berzerk, he collapsed and was pronounced dead the same day. Reports in newspapers suggested that officials were investigating if the player’s heart attack was due to the stress endured while playing the game. Mark Allen, the deputy coroner, said that the autopsy found was due to a scar tissue in his 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.” 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.”

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.

*Some of the content information above was provided by Wikipedia and KLOV (Killer List of Video Games).

*Visit our main website https://cocktailhourentertainment.com

For More Information fill out our Contact Form