Berzerk

Time to beat

Main story

24.5 h8 reports

Main + extras

37 h4 reports

Completionist

Not enough reports yet (needs 3)1 report

Median of the hours reported by players who completed the game.

Synopsis

Berzerk is a 1980 maze and shooter video game developed and published by Stern Electronics for arcades. The game involves a Humanoid Intruder who has to escape maze-like rooms that are littered with robots which slowly move toward and shoot at the Humanoid. The player can shoot at the robots to try to escape the room. Along with the robots, a smiley face known as Evil Otto appears to hunt down the player within each room. The first game to be developed in-house at Stern, Berzerk was designed by programmer Alan McNeil. He slowly developed a game with robots at first, and then later added 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 that taunt the player during gameplay and attract mode. Following Stratovox (1980), it was one of the earliest games to use speech synthesis. Stern premiered the game at the Amusement & Music Operators Association (AMOA) exposition in Chicago in late 1980. It was released shortly thereafter, and sold around 15,000 units. Conversions to the Atari 2600 and Vectrex home consoles were released in 1982, followed by the Atari 5200 in 1984. They were generally received well by the video game press. The Atari 2600 version received a Certificate of Merit award for "Best Solitaire Videogame" from Electronic Games. McNeil developed a 1982 sequel, Frenzy, with more variety. Berzerk directly influenced Robotron: 2084 (1982). The game appeared on various "best of" lists and articles from publications like Flux in 1995, GameSpy in 2002, and Retro Gamer in 2008.

Text license: CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source

Details

Type

Game

Release date

November 12, 1980

Genres

shoot 'em up, maze video game

Platforms

Atari 2600, Atari 5200, arcade video game, Vectrex, Zilog Z80

Created by

Stern Electronics

Countries

United States