Crazy Robots Gone Berzerk

Stern Electronics were not a particularly well known arcade game company but in 1980 they developed and published the smash hit oddity Berzerk. This completely bizarre game was incredibly simple but then many of the best games are. It certainly provided a challenge with a staggering total of 64,000 levels to try and beat.

Players controlled a green humanoid figure and could fire their laser gun to kill enemy robots. Each level consisted of a simple maze filled with malfunctioning robots and you had to clear them away and proceed to the next section as quickly as possible. If you took too long to clear the map then the indestructible Evil Otto would frantically bounce into the level with a big grin on his ugly mug. Everything caused death, touch the side of the maze…you die, touch a robot….you die, get shot by a robot….you die and of course if Evil Otto manages to catch you….you die. You don’t actually need to kill the robots to progress you just need to navigate through the maze without dying although killing robots would score you 50 points and if you cleared them all you’d get an additional bonus. If you managed to reach 5,000 points you got an extra life.

The visual design of the game could not have been more simplistic with blocky characters and simple lines for the walls of the mazes. The really funny thing about the game was the sound design which taunted the player for cowardly acts in a robotic voice. It was one of the first arcade machines to feature synthesised speech and the witty dialogue included various memorable quips.

During Attract Mode the game would say “Coins detected in pocket.” When Evil Otto made an appearance it would scream “Intruder Alert!” and if you ran through a stage without finishing off all the robots first it would taunt you with “Chicken, fight like a robot.” There were thirty lines in all and the robots would also randomly chatter in the background adding to the impression that they had all lost the plot.

The crazy robots were fun opponents and they moved and acted quite randomly which made the game really tricky. As if that wasn’t enough the fact that Evil Otto was completely impervious to damage and could even move through walls made Berzerk a serious challenge. He’d move slowly at first but if you killed all the robots on the stage he’d speed up menacingly.

The game was released as a stand up cabinet and a cocktail table and they sold almost 40,000 units despite a faulty design in the joystick leading to the cancellation of 4,200 orders. The controls were a joystick and a single button and you could play a two player turn about mode.

Berzerk was designed by Alan McNeil after he had a nightmare in which he had to fight robots and he named Evil Otto after a nasty security guard he used to work with. It was ported onto the Atari home consoles and there was a fairly successful sequel called Frenzy. Berzerk was a comically strange game and unlike other arcade classics which have popped up as mobile phone games or on handhelds it seems to have disappeared forever.