Berzerk (1980)
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September 13, 2018
Berzerk is a multi-directional shooter arcade game, released in 1980 by Stern Electronics of Chicago. Berzerk places the player in series of top-down, maze-like rooms containing armed robots.
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.It 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."[3] 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. 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 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, get electrocuted by 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. If all the robots in the current maze have been destroyed before the player escapes, the player gains ten points per robot. The game has 65,536 rooms (256×256 grid), but due to limitations of the random number generation there are fewer than 1,024 maze layouts (876 unique). It has only one controller, but two-player games can be accomplished by alternating at the joystick.
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.
A free life can be awarded at 5,000 or 10,000 points, set by internal DIP switches, with no extra lives thereafter.
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 random robot chatter playing in the background, with 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.
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.It 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."[3] 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. 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 suffered from 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.[4]
Berzerk is one of the first video games to use speech synthesis, featuring talking robots. In 1980, computer voice compression was extremely expensive, estimated to have cost the manufacturer US$1,000 per word;the English version has a thirty-word vocabulary. Stern nevertheless did not spare this expense.
https://archive.org/details/Berzerk_1982_Atari_NTSC
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.It 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."[3] 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. 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 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, get electrocuted by 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. If all the robots in the current maze have been destroyed before the player escapes, the player gains ten points per robot. The game has 65,536 rooms (256×256 grid), but due to limitations of the random number generation there are fewer than 1,024 maze layouts (876 unique). It has only one controller, but two-player games can be accomplished by alternating at the joystick.
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.
A free life can be awarded at 5,000 or 10,000 points, set by internal DIP switches, with no extra lives thereafter.
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 random robot chatter playing in the background, with 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.
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.It 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."[3] 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. 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 suffered from 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.[4]
Berzerk is one of the first video games to use speech synthesis, featuring talking robots. In 1980, computer voice compression was extremely expensive, estimated to have cost the manufacturer US$1,000 per word;the English version has a thirty-word vocabulary. Stern nevertheless did not spare this expense.
https://archive.org/details/Berzerk_1982_Atari_NTSC
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