This Week in Retro: Berzerk [1980] (Patreon)

November 12, 1980: Berzerk takes the "maze game" to dark places

by Diamond Feit

Next to dinosaurs, no concept holds a stronger grip on the imagination of children more than robots. As creatures that we know once lived but are now no more, dinosaurs represent the distant past, and they’re as close to real "monsters" as most kids will ever get to see. Robots represent the opposite, in that they’re what we all imagine as our future. They may be real in our present day, but only in a limited sense. Just as we can see dinosaur skeletons and only sort of grasp that they were living, breathing creatures, we can look at primitive real-world robots and let our sense of make-believe fill in the gaps. Surely, someday we'll all be hanging out with walking, talking mechanical friends… assuming they don't have other ideas about our relationship.

As noted when Missile Command turned 40 earler this year, the birth of consumer video games was made possible by the advancement of computer technology, and games grew alongside that cyber-expansion at a rapid pace. Likewise, robotics quickly leapt from the realm of pure science fiction to real-life factories, legitimizing the fantasy that we might eventually live alongside androids like the ones we saw in Star Trek, Logan's Run, and of course Star Wars.

In the midst of all this cultural mingling, Berzerk arrived in arcades on November 12, 1980. It’s a hard game to describe in that it doesn't quite look like any of its peers; the phrase "maze game" could apply, but there are no dots to eat as in Pac-Man, which had already become a global phenomenon by this point. What it does do is come down hard on visions of our robot future, as Berzerk takes place in a nightmare where it's people vs. machines... and the machines always win.

Crudely put, Berzerk is a single-screen arcade game where both the player and the enemies appear as stick figures trapped in a maze. There are three exits on every screen, which scrolls the action to a new room once you reach one of the doors. The new room you reach is randomly selected from 64,000 different possible layouts. Everyone in the maze can fire lasers, and being struck by a laser or touching anything in the maze—walls included–is deadly for the player and enemies alike.

If that were all there is to Berzerk, it would not be well-remembered today. Yet the game adds just enough flair to make the experience more intense. The player character and the enemies both appear human-like, but they’re distinct from one another in design and in motion. The player is a tall, lean figure whose limbs flail as it runs through the maze. In fact, Berzerk is notable for its use of an eight-way "joy stick" in an era when few games allowed for such free movement. Conversely, the enemies appear shorter and stockier, and they march stoically rather than running. When the player attacks, they point their arm and fire, while the enemies shoot lasers from their single, oscillating eye. In other words, even given the graphical limitations of the time, it’s clear that the player is controlling a human being against a legion of inhuman foes.

But I haven't even gotten to the best part: Berzerk talks. Yes, even though it was made at a time in which few video games even managed to include music, Berzerk uses synthesized speech to give the enemies an extra layer of otherness. The arcade flyer boasts of the game's "unsurpassed 30-word vocabulary" which the enemy robots use to shout threats at the player (whom they address as "THE HUMANOID"), which very likely taught me that word in the process.

For a 1980 arcade game, Berzerk is incredibly fair: The player is outnumbered but rarely overwhelmed by enemies, because everything that hurts the player hurts the robots too. Arriving on a new stage only to watch the robots shoot each other or smash into a wall is not an uncommon sight in Berzerk, and even when the A.I. commits suicide, the player still earns points. With no timer and largely inept robots on every stage, Berzerk is nearly a cakewalk—or at least it would be, were it not for Evil Otto.

Evil Otto is the wild card of Berzerk, a very special opponent with no clear precedent but plenty of descendants. After a few seconds of play on any stage, or immediately after the last robot on-screen is slain, a bouncing ball with a smiley face appears out of nowhere. This is Evil Otto, and he (it?) bounds towards the player at a steadily increasing pace. Otto ignores all walls and lasers; Otto is invulnerable and unstoppable. Otto is the Juggernaut. The only safe strategy when Otto appears is to book it for an exit and scroll to the next stage, which sends Otto away for a spell. But Otto doesn't have a weakness, and the game doesn't have an ending. Eventually Otto will win, every time.

For me as a kid, this was enough sensory input to make Berzerk an attention-grabber. A few years later, however, the game gained a genuinely frightening reputation as a killer. Nevermind those Polybius rumors, this one’s on the record: On April 3, 1982, 18-year-old Peter Burkowski played a game of Berzerk in Calumet City, Illinois, only to walk away from the machine and drop dead. Doctors linked his untimely passing to a heart condition and pointed out that any number of stressful activities could have potentially killed him, but that does not change the fact that from that moment on, Evil Otto had a body count.

While I rarely saw the game in arcades, Berzerk received a highly competent Atari 2600 port. The console adaptation lost the synthetic speech and shrunk the screen, yet it delivered just about everything else. If anything, the smaller screen makes the Atari version more tense than the arcade version, as it leaves less room to maneuver. A later port for the Atari 5200 restored the speech... but since that system tanked, it is barely remembered today.

Likewise, Berzerk would earn a sequel called Frenzy, which ratchets up the danger by introducing ricocheting lasers and destructible walls, but that follow-up never found the same cultural foothold that the first game did. Maybe it was the increased competition in arcades. Perhaps the stick-figure graphics were too dated for 1982. Or maybe Frenzy simply wasn't distinct enough from Berzerk to stand out.

Today, 40 years later, Berzerk is a footnote in arcade history, and most of its modern reputation stems not from its achievements but from that shocking account of a teenager dying. But for a few years, at least, Berzerk was nearly as recognizable as Pac-Man or Donkey Kong: An arcade classic that created real tension as it used its meager electronic voice to egg players into inserting another quarter. If that sounds like an exaggeration, allow me to enter into the record testimony from witnesses Jerry Buckner and Gary Garcia, two American musicians who immortalized the arcade hits of 1981 on their album Pac-Man Fever: the eighth and final track of that album was titled "Goin' Berzerk."

Diamond Feit lives in Osaka, Japan and is an active Twitter user.