It’s charming, yet brutal: a game that, back in the arcades, would lure players to its cabinet by broadcasting oddball one-liners, before stealing their money with unexpected ferocity. It’s simplistic, yet quietly thoughtful, building a world from stick-men and right angles, but populating it with clever ideas such as quirky AI that allows the enemies to make mistakes. And, for all the games it’s inspired, it feels like both forerunner and dead end: a rough sketch of a strange new genre, combined with that genre’s ultimate expression. Berzerk is weird.
It isn’t surprising, then, that the idea came to its designer in a dream. “I dreamt of a black-and-white videogame with a stick-figure man and lots of robots closing in on him,” says Alan McNeil, Berzerk’s creator. “It was just a second’s worth of action, but it was exactly what I made in pass one of the design. Back in those days, I had many epic dreams with much futuristic detail in them, but none were problem solving or prophetic like that. It stood out. The Berzerk dream was more like the déjà -vu flashes I’ve had since I was 11: just for a second, the future overlays the present. Everything: the sights, smells, sounds, touch, even thoughts. It’s pretty confusing and not useful. All it tells me is I can look forward to living until that moment arrives.”
The Berzerk dream came along at a fortuitous time. After a wayward education involving architecture, industrial design, and computer art, McNeil had decided to forge a career in games. Following a stint at Bally/Midway in which he was told he didn’t have the experience to make his own arcade title (“This annoyed me,” remembers the designer. “Every McNeil I’ve met is stubborn as a rock. None like being held back. I’m no exception”), he wound up at Stern Electronics, a troubled firm looking for a pinball programmer. “They had a licence from Bally/Midway to take Bally’s pinball controller board for use in their own games. The problem was they didn’t get source code. They could change the playfield and art but the hardware was frozen. I asked if I could do a videogame if I fixed the pinball problem. They said ‘yes’.”
After creating a new OS for the pinball hardware and turning out a few titles, McNeil could finally put buzzers and ball-bearings behind him. That’s when he had The Dream, and it didn’t take long to turn that dream into a videogame prototype.
Berzerk is a fast-paced multi-directional shooter set inside a series of 64,000 mazes. The player’s objective is to escape from one room to the next without being killed by a range of increasingly aggressive robots – ideally blasting the enemies as they go, earning a point multiplier for clearing each area. It’s a simple concept and one that the designer was quick to get up and running. “Pass one of the game turned out to be exactly that dream moment. I was playing and said: ‘Yay, this is fun’,” says McNeil.
That doesn’t mean it was perfect, however. “It got too hard as the robots increased,” he remembers. “With six robots, I was having a frustrating, un-fun time. The game favoured the robots too much. They would run into each other occasionally, but the average game time, one life, was about six seconds. Not good. I wanted the average starting player to get lots more play before needing to put another quarter in.”
His solution was typically original: fallible AI. “I wanted the robots to be relentless, but so single-minded that they were stupid,” he says, so he crafted foes that would often shoot poorly, or kill themselves in collisions with each other and the environment. “It was different from other games where the enemies were perfect in their attacks and you had to dodge perfectly aimed shots.”
McNeil also added a further means of levelling the odds. “My frustration at being killed so fast sent me on to pass two, known to the engineers as ‘Robot Picnic’. I needed help beating those pesky robots. I needed a weapon. I added laser bolts, and that was better: I could kill a few robots, but they were still changing paths awfully fast and coming at you from too many directions, because there were no walls. Playtime for a life was up to ten seconds. I still wasn’t happy with the game.”
On to pass three. “How could I slow down the robots? I tried making them move slower, but then they looked clunky and lame,” laughs McNeil. “I figured I’d need barriers between the robots and the human. So I started looking at maze generators, and devised a super-simple scheme. To make the maze non-random, I used the XY coordinate of the room as a 16bit number to seed my random number generator. That way you could exit, run back and see the same room. It makes the universe more real if you leave a room with a box in the middle and return to a room with box in the middle. Totally random rooms are not immersive: your brain goes ‘huh?’ and the fantasy collapses.”
After electrifying the walls of the rooms to make them deadly for both players and robots, McNeil was on his way to an entertaining game, but plenty of other titles would feature mazes and gunplay. A big part of Berzerk’s strange appeal was born with the inclusion of Evil Otto: a floating smiley face that pursues the player, and cannot be killed.
“The pass-three game had some problems,” McNeil explains. “You could stand all day in a room once the robots were eliminated, so I needed something to get you to move along. This was in the era of the smiley face, that obnoxious yellow circle with the two black dots for eyes, the arc for a smile and the words ‘Have a nice day!’ below it. I really despised it. I associated it with salesman and corporations, neither of which really wanted you to have a nice day but both want to cover themselves in fake friendliness. I decided to show it like it was: ‘Have a nice day while I beat you to death’. I made the smiley come straight for you while bouncing like a yellow ball. It added a dash of bitter sarcasm.”
The game’s final ingredient came from the emerging field of speech synthesis, another area that received a McNeil twist. While a handful of early arcade games spoke to players, Berzerk just wouldn’t shut up. “A salesman visited us during the development of Berzerk with a ‘speech chip’ intended for helping blind people,” McNeil remembers. “They were hoping to get it into toys or games. It sounded very robotic and was limited to around 24 fixed words. It was using custom hardware to make hisses and tones: all the computer could control was the word and the pitch of the word. You could order these chips with any set of words, limited to the tiny chip size. The price was good in large quantities. The boss said: ‘Could you use it?’ I was sure I could right away.
“I wanted the robots to sound like they were hunting you. I thought of ways the robots might describe the player: ‘intruder’ and ‘human’ came to mind. One of the engineers would run through the maze rooms without shooting any robots, so I decided to add in an extra player noun just for him: ‘chicken’! Any time you left live robots in the previous room, the next room’s robots would taunt you with ‘Kill the chicken’. When I assembled the complete list of nouns and verbs, I had three words left and I had one sentence I really wanted on the chip so I dropped one verb and added: ‘Coin detected in pocket’. One bar patron actually said: ‘How did it know I still have some quarters?’ and played until he didn’t have quarters to find out.”
Those four passes – plus an 11th-hour shift to colour graphics – were enough to make the game a hit with developers and punters alike. “I talked to Eugene Jarvis and Larry DeMar [the developers of the Berzerk-influenced Robotron: 2084] when I was considering working for Williams,” says McNeil. “They are both great guys. I remember Eugene saying that Berzerk irritated them and they wanted to modify it to include some tougher situations. That was the itch they scratched for Robotron. I’m the same way. Something will irritate me and I’ll want to improve it or redesign it.”
After Berzerk, McNeil made a handful of other games, before heading off to get involved with animation programming. Today, he works mainly with the internet. While he’s proud of his arcade endeavours, he admits he doesn’t spend a great deal of time thinking about Evil Otto or all those mazes. In fact, he doesn’t even have his own Berzerk cabinet. “That’s a sore point,” he winces. “I was given the first test cabinet – no outside artwork, just black. An arcade operator that I barely knew asked if he could put it on location and then split the take 50/50. At the end of that month he came over and gave me a bag with $300 in quarters. I never saw him again.
“I mentioned my missing game to one of the production guys. He said he had friends that could take care of the problem for a little favour in the future. They could leave him a hint, like a large salmon on his pillow.” McNeil pauses. “I turned him down.”
This article was first published in E225
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