Berzerk arrives in arcades on November 12, 1980


You just had to be there. That's the only lens one can sometimes use to fully comprehend a major event in the past. Sure, it's notable that the first television set was manufactured on a particular date, when you sit in a room with one today that receives thousands of channels. But what was the dawn of television like if you'd never seen a moving picture in your own home before? That's the lens through which one must view the arrival of the Stern arcade machine Berzerk on November 12, 1980.

America had seen Space Invaders. It had been devoured by Asteroids. But Berzerk brought sci-fi horror into a more intimate space. Instead of shooting at aliens at a distance from the relative safety of your base or starship, you were in what Lin Manuel Miranda might call "the room where where it happens." Your "humanoid," with the physique of Christopher Lee and the gait of Joe Biden after five espressos, runs and laser guns his way through rooms filled with killer robots. An even more sinister foe waits offscreen to make his eventual entrance on each level of the game: a smiley face named Evil Otto.

Designed by brilliant programmer Alan McNeil, Berzerk was inspired by the Berserker stories and novels of Fred Saberhagen. One of many prescient 20th-century science fiction premonitions of a future that is only now encroaching upon us, the Berserker saga told of killer machines created by an extraterrestrial race for war. But when that war was won, the machines - who had been programmed to destroy biological life - turned on their creators, rendering them extinct. And once again finding themselves with nothing left to do but twiddle their metallic thumbs, they set off into the galaxy and beyond to find more lifeforms to annihilate.

McNeil's digital vision was surprisingly faithful to the Saberhagen works for a 1980 arcade game. The robots in the game sport a singular electronic eye that scans the rooms looking for you. It makes perfect sense that the one-eyed alien race known as The Builders would have given their mechanical creations physical attributes echoing their own. And those mechanical opponents move and sound as relentless as Saberhagen's antagonists.

That's right: sound. Remember, I said you had to be there? Well, in 1980, arcade machines didn't give you lip. Berzerk did. "Quarters detected in pocket," an electronic voice would bark with a mix of menace and superiority as a startled gamer passed by the machine. The robot voices, while reminiscent of the Cylons of Battlestar Galactica, conveyed a fair degree of cyborgian emotion. These metallic fellows sound downright miffed that you are on the premises. Panicked and alarmed when you wipe out a room of their compadres and jog into the next. And overconfident enough to deliver the taunt, "Chicken, fight like a robot!"

Yet, with the ties to Saberhagen established, much was left to the fertile imagination of the player. Where are you, exactly? Aboard a berserker starship? In one of their bases? After all, the robots are referring to you as an "intruder." Or are you the last human being, desperately fighting to postpone your own inevitable death?

And let's talk about Evil Otto. McNeil described him as a satire of the 1970s "Have a Nice Day" smiley face stickers, and the underlying hostility they represented, much like the "In this house, we believe" signs of today. But in the game, Otto was all business. The sense of dread in the player that this invincible fiend was going to appear at the time and place of his choosing wasn't matched by another video game until the Nemesis of Resident Evil 3, nearly two decades later.

Was it all too much? The close-quarter gunfights? The nightmarish shouts and taunts of your cybernetic superiors? The heart pounding wait for Evil Otto's imminent appearance?

Berzerk was killing the people playing it, some alleged. The Associated Press reported that Peter Bukowski dropped dead after playing Berzerk at Friar Tuck's Game Room in Calumet City, Illinois on April 3, 1982. A coroner determined Bukowski, only 18 at the time, had suffered a heart attack. The usual suspects began to circle like vultures to point fingers at the latest Entertainment Pursuit that Old People Don't Understand. Predictably, Robotic Panic led to rumors that others had died in similar ways after playing the game. There's little reason to believe this was more than another urban legend.

But the fact that people could believe playing Berzerk could trigger a heart attack simply underscores what a groundbreaking entertainment it was. You had to be there, yes, but this sort of anecdote can give you a sense that this game provided an unprecedented experience in the darkened bars and game rooms of America. 

And now the game was coming home? Almost two years later, gamers were experiencing something else that the post-arcade generations cannot fathom. Right there, in the glossy Atari catalog clutched in the hands of videogame addicts in every corner of this republic, was a series of shimmering pages. They laid out where your allowance money was going for for the rest of 1982. 

Pac-Man would arrive in May. Defender - Defender! - in June. And, turning the next page with a crackle, Berzerk in August. The anticipation of Berzerk in August had the side benefit of making the summer of 1982 longer. And then it was down the escalator at Sears. Seeing the Berzerk box from the escalator awaiting you in the bin. Admiring the slick packaging all the way home. Putting the cartridge into the Atari 2600.

Sure, there weren't any voices. But everything else was there. And no quarters necessary. Thank God it was still summer vacation, or you'd have to tell the teacher the robots ate your homework. One of the best home adaptations of an arcade game at the time, Berzerk sold like hotcakes. 

The cultural phenomenon of Berzerk spawned even more than home versions and a sequel. It inspired clones. It inspired a Milton Bradley board game. It inspired a Styx album. It inspired kids to go to the library and check out Berserker books, and then other books about robots and the existential questions that puzzle mankind.

Video games that get kids to read? Like I said, you had to be there.

Location: Calumet City, IL, USA

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