The humanoid must destroy all robots using his laser gun without touching the deadly walls, colliding with a robot, or getting shot. The indestructable Evil Otto is the game's timer, forcing the player to move on. The game has 64,000 different mazes, with a constantly increasing difficulty level.
The board was based aound a Z80 processor, the speech was done using LPC coding, costing $1,000 USD per word to compress at that time. The game originally had a monochrome monitor, but when Defender was released in color, Stern re-designed using a color overlay board.
Berzerk was Stern's first major video game success. It was made in both upright (approx. 37500) and cocktail (approx. 1200) models. It was also one of the first talking games, with classics like "Get the Humanoid", "Chicken! Fight like a Robot", "Intruder Alert!", or "Coins Detected in pocket!"?
Berzerk shares a rather chilling distinction of being the first known game to be implicated in an actual player's death. In January 1981, Jeff Dailey, a 19-year old Berzerk player, died of a massive heart attack right after playing Bezerk. Also in October 1982, 18-year old Peter Burkowski collapsed and died of a heart attack after getting on the high score table twice in 15 minutes.
Arrow keys to move
CTRL key to fire
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