Berzerk (1980)

at 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