Berzerk
| Berzerk | |
|---|---|
| Studio | Stern Electronics |
| Publisher | Stern Electronics |
| Erstveröffent- lichung |
1980 |
| genre | Shoot 'em up |
| Game mode | Multiplayer (two players take turns) |
| control | Joystick , one button |
| casing | Standard and Cocktail |
| Arcade system | Main CPU : Z80 (@ 2.5 MHz) Sound chips: special tone generator and LPC speech synthesizer |
| monitor | Raster resolution 256 × 224 (horizontal), color palette: 16 |
Berzerk is a shoot-'em-up - arcade game , which in 1980 by Stern Electronics was developed and published. The company sold about 39,000 Berzerk machines.
Game description
The player controls a green stick figure with the help of a joystick through a maze in which there are shooting robots. With a button the player can use a laser weapon in turn. By colliding with enemy projectiles, the robots, the walls and a flying smiley , which is called Evil Otto in the game, the player can lose life .
The game uses the character of Evil Otto to increase the hectic pace: this figure can move through walls and cannot be injured by the player's weapon. It appears after a certain time and moves towards the player at about half the speed of the player, as long as there are still robots in the maze, and adjusts its speed when the last opponent is destroyed. The game has 64,000 levels , each of which has an exit on the four outer walls through which a new level can be entered.
development
Legend has it that Alan McNeil, an employee of Universal Research Laboratories , a division of Stern, had a dream one night about a black and white computer game in which he was fighting robots. This dream and the influence of the turn-based BASIC game Robots was the basis of Berzerk. The game itself was named after Fred Saberhagen's science fiction series Berserker . However, Stern rejected the idea of a black and white game after the color game Defender was successfully marketed by Williams in the same year . Except for the first versions of the system, the game was delivered with a color CRT screen.
particularities
Berzerk was one of the first arcade games to use screen reader. For promotional purposes it uses the phrase "Coins detected in pocket" to induce a potential player to insert coins. The appearance of Evil Otto is commented on with an "Intruder Alert!" When leaving a level, the machine sounds the phrase “The humanoid must not escape!” Or “Chicken! Fight like a robot! ”, If not all robots have been destroyed.
Berzerk has a vocabulary of 30 words compressed using Linear Predictive Coding . The cost at the time was about $ 1,000 for a word. Nevertheless, Stern produced versions adapted to other countries, including a Spanish one. Another special feature was the low artificial intelligence of the opponents compared to other games . It's not uncommon for the robots to eliminate themselves by running into walls or allies, or by shooting at each other. This stupidity of the opponents led to many strategies to achieve a place in the highscore table , since it makes no difference in terms of evaluation whether the player switches off the robots or they do it themselves.
Stern released two different versions of Berzerk, which differ in the strength of the opponents. The first version has three different types of robots, the most dangerous of which can fire two shots at the same time. The shots are not fired at the same time, but can be on the screen at the same time. In addition, Evil Otto doubles his speed as soon as the player has collected more than 5,000 points. The second version includes six different types of robots that can fire up to seven faster projectiles at the same time. However, the speed of Evil Otto does not increase.
Ports
Berzerk has been ported to Atari 2600 , Atari 5200 and Vectrex . Whereby the implementation on Atari 2600 has the possibility to put Evil Otto temporarily out of action. The version for Atari 5200 is the only official conversion that also uses speech output. Big Five Software produced a clone of the game for the TRS-80 with Robot Attack . Robot Attack is the first game for this computer that has speech output.
Others
Berzerk is often mentioned as the first video game to be involved in a gamer's death. In January 1981, 19-year-old Jeff Dailey died of a serious heart attack shortly after reaching a score of 16,660. In October 1982, 18-year-old Peter Burkowski died of a heart attack after putting his initials on the high score list of a Berzerk machine twice within 15 minutes.
Buckner & Garcia released the song Goin 'Berzerk , which uses sound effects from the game, on the album Pac-Man Fever in 1982 .
There is a song on an Aphex Twin album called Humanoid must not escape .
Web links
- Berzerk in the Killer List of Video Games (English)
- Berzerk at MobyGames (English)
- Berzerk at www.arcade-history.com
Individual evidence
- ^ Berzerk arcade video game by Stern Electronics, Inc. (1980). Retrieved August 11, 2018 .
- ↑ Lee Seitz: Death of a Video Gamer. Retrieved August 11, 2018 .