Berzerk (Arcade & Atari 2600) - Digitized Speech on the Atari 2600?! - Saturday Afternoon Gaming
27Chicken, fight like a robot!
💥 Fan of the channel? Help support the series ► https://www.patreon.com/GamingJay1001
💥 Follow me on Twitter ► https://twitter.com/GamingJay1001
💥 Check out the website ► http://letsplay1001.com/
💥 Check out the book ► http://www.amazon.com/1001-Video-Games-Must-Before/dp/0789320908
I'm Gaming Jay: Youtube gamer, let's player, fan of retro games, and determined optimist... Normally I'm working my way through the book 1001 VIDEO GAMES YOU MUST PLAY BEFORE YOU DIE in my Let's Play 1001 Games series. This is a great book with a ton of classic retro games but it doesn't have everything and it's even missing some of my favorite video games. Hence, in Saturday Afternoon Gaming, screw it, I'm just going to play whatever I want!
In this series I will be playing some of the best retro games that don't appear in the 1001 VIDEO GAMES YOU MUST PLAY BEFORE YOU DIE book. So pull up a chair, slap on your headphones, and join me as babble aimlessly through some of my most favourite classic games! And hey, if you have ideas or suggestions feel free to leave them in the comments below. I'm always looking for more games to try! Today we play...
Berzerk
from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berzerk_(video_game)
Berzerk is a multidirectional shooter arcade game, released in 1980 by Stern Electronics of Chicago. Berzerk places the player in a series of top-down, mazelike rooms containing armed robots.
The player controls a green stick man. Using a joystick and a firing button that activates a laser-style weapon, the player navigates a simple maze filled with many robots, who fire lasers back at the player character. A player can be killed by being shot, by running into a robot or an exploding robot, getting electrocuted by the electrified walls of the maze itself, or by being touched by the player's nemesis, Evil Otto.
Alan McNeil, an employee of Universal Research Laboratories (a division of Stern Electronics), had a dream one night involving a black-and-white video game in which he had to fight robots. It was named for Fred Saberhagen's Berserker series of science fiction novels.[3]
"Evil Otto" was named after Dave Otto, security chief at McNeil's former employer Dave Nutting Associates. According to McNeil, Otto would, "[smile] while he chewed you out."[4] He would also lock McNeil and his fellow employees out of the building to enforce a noon-hour lunch, as well as piping beautiful music into every room.[3]
The idea for a black-and-white game was abandoned. At that point Stern decided to use a color overlay board for Berzerk.[5] A quick conversion was made, and all but the earliest versions of the game shipped with a color CRT display. The game was test-marketed successfully at a Chicago singles bar before general release.
The game units suffered from failure of the optical 8-way joystick unit; Stern suffered the cancellation of about 4,200 orders for new games because of previous purchasers' bad experiences with these joysticks. The company responded by issuing free replacement joysticks in a leaf-switch design by Wico.[5]
Berzerk is one of the first video games to use speech synthesis, featuring talking robots. In 1980, computer voice compression was extremely expensive, estimated to have cost the manufacturer US$1,000 per word;[5] the English version has a thirty-word vocabulary.
Berzerk was officially ported to the Atari 2600, Atari 5200, and Vectrex. The Atari 2600 version features an option in which Evil Otto could be temporarily killed, though he always returns. The Atari 5200 version is the only home version to include digitized speech, though the 2600 version was hacked in 2002 to include speech.[9] A port for the Atari 8-bit family of computers, identical to the Atari 5200 version, was ready in 1983, but was not published.[10] An unofficial port for the NES was released by Parisoft in July 2019.
In 1982, Stern released Frenzy as a sequel. A Berzerk arcade machine can be converted to Frenzy simply by replacing one processor (ZPU-1000 to ZPU-1001) and installing a different ROM.