I just received in the mail one of my favourite games of all time.
Originally Berzerk (I didn’t realize the spelling until now) was an arcade game, and as well as the Atari VCS/2600 version here, it was ported to many, many systems, both officially licensed and clones.
Berzerk had an official sequel called Frenzy (1982) but was influential on lots of games such as Robotron: 2084. My first in-depth experience was playing a rip-off called Amok on the Vic 20.
Man, I loved that game,
It’s a simple overhead view maze shooter, but with directional shooting and you can get the robot bad-guys to self destruct by walking into walls.
Considering the Atari 2600 and the unexpanded Vic 20 both had minimal RAM (the VCS only has 128 bytes of RAM on board!), there’s surprisingly a lot to the game, with 1,024 maze layouts (876 of which are unique) according to Wikipedia.
Between this and Galaga, I am not sure which comes top, but I can play and play quite happily, decades later!
Berzerk is a 1980 maze shooter arcade video game designed by Alan McNeil and released by Stern Electronics. The game involves a Humanoid Intruder who has to escape maze-like rooms that are littered with robots that slowly move towards and shoot at the Humanoid. The player can shoot at the robots to try and escape the room. Along with the robots, a smiley face known as Evil Otto appears to hunt down the player within each room.
Stern allowed McNeil to develop his own game. He slowly developed a game initially with robots, later adding the walls and the Evil Otto character to expand on the gameplay. After the company was visited by a salesperson promoting a “speech chip”, McNeil took the offer and incorporated digitized voices in the game that taunt the player during game play and attract mode. Along with games like Stratovox (1980), it was one of the earliest games to feature speech synthesis in arcade games.
Stern premiered the game at the Amusement & Music Operators Association (AMOA) exposition in Chicago in late 1980.
Redemption of the Sinden Lightgun