Berzerk



"Intruder alert! Intruder alert!"

A forgotten classic of The Golden Age of Video Games. The player controls a humanoid, who must shoot robots and/or escape the room.

Berzerk was one of the first video games to have voice synthesis, which it put to good use. It compels passers-by to play by saying, "Coin detected in pocket"; spurs its computerized cohorts to victory with, "Stop the humanoid. Stop the intruder"; expresses its consternation with the player's success by saying, "The humanoid must not escape", and, most famously, insults a fleeing player with, "Chicken. Fight like a robot."

Also noteworthy for being one of the first video games that afforded the player non-linear ways of achieving goals. The AI robots could be goaded into shooting each other, walking into deadly walls or otherwise killing themselves without the player firing a shot.

Berzerk was even blamed for two deaths. Two teenagers in separate arcades had heart attacks after achieving high scores, causing Moral Guardians to wonder whether arcade video games were too much excitement for people to handle. Even in 1980, most people didn't take them seriously.

The game received a sequel, Frenzy, which introduces two styles of robots (skeletons and tanks, who act the same, but the skeletons are slightly harder to hit from above or below), a temporarily-destroyable Evil Otto, destructible and reflective walls, and "Special" rooms with some feature that adds a twist to the normal game (the Robot Factory constantly sends out new robots, shooting the Power Plant immobilizes all robots in the room, shooting the Central Computer causes all robots in the room to go crazy and destroy each other, and Big Otto gets very very angry if you destroy Evil Otto in his chamber).

May have inspired Castle Wolfenstein and its update, Wolfenstein 3D. Unrelated to the manga Berserk (except for the whole endless, futile war thing).


 * Artificial Stupidity:
 * The player can use the other robots to kill each other and make Evil Otto smash the robots. They're slightly smarter in Frenzy (they won't walk into each other, for example), but not by much.
 * In the Atari 2600 version, the robots couldn't walk into each other (due to a one-robot-per-scanline technical limitation), but were much more likely to walk into walls.
 * Attract Mode
 * Big Monster Cute Name: Evil Otto... though the big monster himself was cute too, being rendered as a smiley face. Originally, this was a temporary graphic until the programmer could think of something cool to use. The idea of players running away from something so cute and insipid was funny to the programmer. So Evil Otto stayed a happy face.
 * Breaking the Fourth Wall: "Coin detected in pocket!"
 * Check Point
 * Deadly Walls: Rare non-shoot'em up example. Averted in Frenzy.
 * Endless Game
 * Hitbox Dissonance: See the humanoid in the picture at the top of this page? Well, its head and body have two separate hitboxes. A horizontal shot through that gap where the neck would be, is entirely harmless. Call it an "Asimovian necktie".
 * Implacable Man: Evil Otto.
 * Invincible Minor Minion: Evil Otto cannot be destroyed, but his appearance forces the player to exit the room. In Frenzy, Otto can be destroyed (it takes three hits); however, each such destruction will result in a new Otto spawning immediately thereafter, and moving faster than the previous one (more than 3 Otto kills on one level can be said to constitute a Crowning Moment of Awesome for the player who accomplishes that).
 * Mooks: The robots.
 * Moral Guardians: See above.
 * Names to Run Away From Really Fast: Evil Otto.
 * Nintendo Hard: Most people can't last three rooms.
 * Nothing Is Scarier: Much of the game's atmosphere is derived from this.
 * Oh Crap: "Intruder alert! Intruder alert!" (or, in the sequel, "Robot attack!")
 * In Frenzy, destroying Evil Otto in a Big Otto room is a bad idea, causing him to spawn four Evil Ottos and send them after you at top speed, in addition to the normal respawning one. "Oh crap" indeed.
 * One-Man Army
 * Perpetual Smiler: Evil Otto, though in the sequel Frenzy, you can shoot him, and his smile will turn into a neutral face, and then a frown.
 * Robo Speak
 * Robot War
 * Shoot'Em Up
 * Stalked by the Bell: Evil Otto. This may be the Trope Maker.
 * Take That, Player: Exit a screen before killing every robot and they chastise you for it. "Chicken! Fight like a robot!"
 * Do it enough times in a row, and the robots start calling you "the chicken" instead of "the humanoid" in their background chatter.
 * Underground Monkey: There is only one type of robot: as the game progresses, it changes color as it shoots more/faster shots.