Jump to content
IGNORED

Berzerk and Alan McNeil


Atari-Jess

Recommended Posts

For those of you here long enough to remember me, I was a big fan of Berzerk. Quite a long time ago now.

 

I knew early on about the significance of that era of video game history and that many of the games and devices that I enjoyed were created by people, pioneers, who were largely still with us 20 years ago. On occasion, I could find the contact information of some of these individuals and talk about "the good old days"...

 

I found one for Alan McNeil the programmer for Stern's Berzerk. I found the email while waxing nostalgic. I thought I would look him up again and discovered he had passed in 2017.

 

I had a number of questions for him, but he offered me a lengthy writeup about Berzerk that he had originally written for an British video game magazine. I don't know which one it was, and none of the text is coming up with any results online. Maybe it's out there somewhere but he copied his original responses to the questions which for all I know could have been abridged, reduced, edited, modified in some way, etc.

 

He invited me to use his writeup as I had always planned on sharing it with AtariAge. I just never got around to it.

 

That was in 2008.  

 

I'll just paste the good part, the actual body of text rather than the kind words I had for him and Berzerk... what I offer are the unabridged and verbatim responses for the unnamed magazine. Maybe you can help identify it?

 

Quote

I found the Berzerk stuff I wrote for an English retrogames magazine. 
I'm working on a bit about Frenzy, although that time went by in a 
blur due to all-nighters. The questions starting with a - are from the 
gamer magazine.

BACKGROUND
- What's your background (education/work)? How did you get involved in 
programming and the games industry?

I had went to college and took 6 years to figure out what I was doing. 
I started in Architecture, then switched to Industrial Design, then 
switched to Film then Video & Computer Art where I met Ted Nelson who 
showed us a lot of cutting edge graphic and music computers (like 
Moog). Then PLATO came to campus. It was a network of amazing 
graphical computer terminals for computer aided education. Because of 
the size of the network (about 1000 terminals across the USA) it was 
the perfect platform to develop the first network games. Almost 
everything from chatrooms to forums were invented back on PLATO way 
before the internet. The games were crude but it was fun to be 
'zbaren' in dogfight sitting in Chicago and blast someone out of the 
sky playing in a different state.

- You got in on the ground floor of gaming, so to speak, so what was 
it that excited you about the medium? Had you played any games prior 
to creating your own?

I always liked games. I played a lost of Mille Bournes and Stratego as 
a kid.

- How did you come to work at Stern? What was it like in those days, 
being pioneers of arcade gaming, and not being restricted in terms of 
conceptual output (unlike the way all games designers are today)?

Lets go back a step. I started at Dave Nutting Associates, a small 
group (under 12 people) that was owned my Bally/Midway. They had 
already done Gunfight and Seawolf for Midway when they hired me away 
from the first computer store in Chicago, "itty bitty computers". 
While at DNA, I worked on GunfightII and SeawolfII then on the Bally 
Arcade. That game console should have beaten the Atari but Midway 
couldn't build them without zapping the main chip with static. 90% of 
the units were dead at the end of the assembly line. Very sad. I wrote 
the OS for the Bally Arcade also wrote the development system. When 
the Macintosh came out, I saw a lot of similarities in OS style.

So after it was obvious that I would be working on arcade games 
forever, I asked Dave Nutting if I could design my own game. He said 
"No, you need more experience." He showed me some graph paper with 
boxes filled in (how we coded up pixels) - "There's a lot of work in 
the design of a game. In a couple of years, you can try designing a 
game." This annoyed me. Every McNeil I've bet is stubborn - I'm no 
exception. I don't like being told "You're not good enough to do 
that." So I started reading the job ads every Sunday.

I already had a couple of primitive games by other people running on 
my Sol20. There was sort of missile command like game and in Basic I 
had coded up "robots" based on a magazine article in Byte magazine. It 
was clunky - we still have it in Gnome. I thought a smooth running 
"dodge the robots that are trying to kill you" game would be cool.

URL (Universal Research Labs) a subsidiary of Stern Electronics ran an 
1/8 page ad looking for a pinball programmer. I scheduled an interview 
right away. They were in a tough spot. They had a license from Bally/
Midway to make Bally's pinball controller board for use in their own 
games. The problem was they didn't get source code so they couldn't 
change the scoring or rules. They could change the playfield and art 
but the hardware was frozen. I asked if I could do a video game after 
I fixed the pinball problem. They said yes the wanted to get into 
video games. So I hired on for 32K$/year.

I took hex dumps of the ROM's and figured out the assembly language 
and then knew how the hardware worked. Then I wrote a new OS to run 
the pinball games. The first game out with the new OS was Meteor. Next 
one I did was Big Game - that had a wide box and 7 digit scores. 
Meanwhile they recruited two of the engineers that worked on the Bally 
Arcade who started work on hardware for a black and white video game - 
about like original SeaWolf.

Finally I had a prototype hooked up to my development system (from 
Tektronix - remember 8 inch floppy disks?) and started a game.
=
=
=
=
=
=
========================================================================
BERZERK
Berzerk was the number one game in Chicago until PacMan came out. 
Games were tested for popularity at a neutral arcade that all the big 
boys used. Red Quarters! I just remembered that whenever anyone 
connected to the game industry came in the door at that arcade the 
owner would hand you a hand full of quarters all painted red with nail 
polish. He could eliminate all the red quarters from his counts. It 
was a good arcade. He had a rent-a-cop here in the evenings to keep 
things calm. Mostly it was frequented by teenage boys.

- What was the inspiration behind Berzerk? How did the project come to 
be?
There was a game in BASIC called robots that was in the first or 
second issue of Byte Magazine. I played it a lot on my Altair. There 
was a plus sign (you) and a bunch of O's (hunter bots). You typed in 
your move in compass direction and then it refreshed the screen. The 
robots moved toward you on the shortest path possible using only the 8 
compass directions but were stupid in that they exploded when the 
crashed into each other. I carried that concept of vicious robots that 
were so single minded about killing you that they didn't watch out for 
each other. I'd also read all the Fred Saberhagen Berzerker stories. 
The title is homage to his excellent stories.

- What was the original concept for Berzerk, and how did this change 
as you worked on the game? Please talk a little about the process of 
making the game.
* How did you come up with the visual design for the enemies?
* How did you come up with the AI/capabilities for the enemies?

I had a dream of a Black & White video game with a stick figure man 
and lots of robots closing in on him. Just a second's worth of action 
but it was exactly what I made in pass one. I had the shifty eyed 
robots inspired by the Cylons with their moving red eye in the 
original BattleStar Galactica. I had a stick figure guy. Interface was 
a joystick designed in house (more on that in a minute).

When I got the pass one game up, it played like an extremely intense 
realtime version of gnobots. It was too hard even with just 6 robots. 
I knew the game favored the robots too much. They would run into each 
other occasionally but the average game time (one life) was about 6 
seconds. No good.

I had a rule of thumb for game play that the coin operators (arcade 
owners) hated. They were greedy guys (as so many no talent people are) 
They always wanted options switches to set the number of lives to 1. I 
refused to program that in/ I also believe that my rule of thumb help 
make Berzerk a good value coin-op game. The rule was take the current 
price of a movie theater ticket and divided it down to pennies per 
minute then figure out the time you should get for a quarter - it was 
between 3 and 5 minutes back then depending on where the theater was 
located. So I made my goal a 3 minute game for a beginner.

It was the start of pass 2. OK I need help beating these robots. I 
need a weapon. I put in laser bolts because I could add a dot to the 
front and remove on from the rear on each frame and they then looked 
smooth and were large enough to see. This was better. I could kill a 
few robots but they were changing paths fast and coming at you from 
too many directions. Playtime for a life was up to 10 seconds and 
sometimes you'd survive. So far there were no walls. I tried making 
your bolt bounce on the edges but that kept it alive too long, you had 
to dodge you own reflected bolt too. I brought that feature back in 
Frenzy in some rooms with mirror walls.

On to pass 3: So how could I slow down the robots? Also now that there 
were walls they crashed too often. I tried making them move slower but 
then they looked clunky and lame. The animated legs didn't look right 
when slowed down. I figured I'd need barriers between the robots and 
the human. So I started looking at maze generators. They took too much 
time on a 4mHz Z80 (the target cpu). So I devised a super simple 
scheme. Assume there are solid walls around the room with doors in the 
N,E,S,W walls. Now divide the space into a 4 by 3 group of tiles. 
Pretend there is a support column at every tile intersection that 
isn't embeded in a wall. Now attach one wall to each column, spin it 
in a random N,E,S,W direction while allowing overlaps. Most of the 
time it made very nice maze like rooms. Sometimes it would create a 
2x1 box in the middle. I'd put a robot in every tile so sometimes 
there would be 2 robots stuck in a room in the middle.

To make the maze non-random, I used the XY coordinate of the room as a 
16 bit number to seed my random number generator. That way you could 
exit the room and run back and see the same shaped room. It makes the 
universe more real if you leave a room with a box in the middle and 
return to a box in the middle room. Totally random rooms are not 
immersive - your brain goes "HUH?", the robot shoots you for a place 
it couldn't before and you get pissed at the game.

Ideally the game should be challenging but not brutally so. You should 
feel like you are constantly making progress at getting better. You 
should leave it after defeat with the feeling, "Awww I just made a 
little mistake, I could beat that next time."

The pass 3 game had some problems. The game was feeling decent but 
still too hard. It was smooth playing and fun but the robots were too 
deadly accurate. Theyd all open fire at once. Also there were robots 
stuck in center rooms that you couldn't shoot. Another problem was you 
could stand all day in a room once the robots were eliminated so I 
needed something to get you to "move along".

Yes you lucked out. I'm not a bad writer myself. All writers are 
weasel according to Dilbert/Scott Adams: "The best weasel ploy is to 
get the interviewee to write the article for you, then sell it." yup 
yup yup. OK with me (although I should get a copy of the magazine I'd 
hope!). I get to rehash the process from a far perspective, my kids 
get a bit of biography of their dad. Plus there are a ton of Berzerk/
Frenzy fans out there and I do appreciate them all. It leads to some 
great friendships - "You wrote Berzerk? You? Oh man! Do you know how 
many quarters I put into that machine in college!" that kind of 
conversation with a Internet star trumps the usual who can pee higher 
on the tree, one-upmanship that programers often go through when they 
meet.

Evil Otto and adjusting the robots viciousness.
----------------------------------------------------------
   **see previous** The robots have AI uncommon for the time, in that 
they too make errors - why did you include this, and how much of a 
difference do you think this makes to the game? I guess strong players 
can take advantage of the robot's nature, getting them to shoot each 
other.
   -see below- Evil Otto (what's with the name?) was also unusual for 
the time, what with him being indestructible. What was the thinking 
behind that character? (Subsequent games used the 'hurry up' device 
quite a lot - Otto somewhat reminds me of Baron Von Blubba from Bubble 
Bobble these days, although Otto's smiling face is somehow more 
ominous.)
** see previous ** How are the mazes generated? Are they relatively 
random, or is there a 'set' of mazes, with one chosen for the player 
once they enter a room?
----------------------------------------------------------
Remember the 2 robots stuck in a room in the middle. No problem when 
the robots bump each other and blow up. One scenario was a problem 
still: if you got a 1x1 room with a single robot in it, there was no 
way to get rid of it. Enter Evil Otto.

It was the era of the smiley face, that obnoxious yellow circle with 
the two black dots for eyes and the arc for a smile and the words 
below "Have a Nice Day!". 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 righteousness. So 
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 to the game. (I was 
known as Mr Sarcasm long before Berzerk.)

The name, Evil Otto, was both a pun, Evil Auto (-matic push-you-on 
device), and a reference to the security manager Mr Otto at DNA. Mr 
Otto once decided that all engineers and programmers should take lunch 
from exactly noon until exactly 1pm atomic time. He instituted this 
with the announcement we all had to drop everything and head out the 
doors for lunch exactly on time. He then locked the doors until 1pm. 
Naturally this torqued us off. When we arrived back at 12:50 on a cold 
day to find we couldn't get back in. The very next day we all started 
having 2 hours lunches. Within a week, the main boss made Otto give up 
his plan. This was but one of many "guilty until proven innocent" type 
moves that Otto tried. So the ball got named Evil Otto. The two 
engineers from DNA liked the name a lot.

Evil Otto took care of the single robot in a box problem. You could 
move so the path from Evil Otto to you passed through the 1x1 box. 
Then Evil Otto would stomp the robot for you in his quest to smash you.

So that was Pass 4. There were 2 robot bullets shared by all the 
robots. The game was good but static in terms of progression - a term 
the game industry used to mean the longer you played the harder it 
should get. So the game was a bit too hard for the secretaries to play 
and too easy for the programmers. Time for Pass 5.

This was a tweaking pass. I added bullet progression starting with 
zero robot bullets and getting up to a maximum dictated by memory 
constraints. The whole game had to fit in 8 Kilobytes of ROM (read 
only memory). The only ram was the screen - there was a tiny bit of 
screen memory that wasn't displayed because those locations would be 
in the vertical retrace time. So that tiny bit of RAM had to store all 
X,Ys of objects, the XY of the room, the number of players, their 
scores, the array of high scores, etc. I kept track of the rooms you 
left after killing robots and used that count to drive decide on the 
number of robot bullets. It made it seem like the robots were going 
from peeved to angry to berserk with rage. I spend several days trying 
different combos on the secretaries and other new players to get that 
initial play time of 3 minutes. That also meant adjusting Evil Otto's 
timer so he didn't come out too soon. I adding a hold off based on you 
killing robots in that room. Even that got tweaked.

Another tweak was the robot movement. The robots start slower and get 
faster as levels progress. I revised the movement speed to match 
animation speed of the robots. I didn't want to see any feet sliding 
along the ground after all I got my degree in Design partially by 
doing 7 minutes of animation. To get people immersed in the game there 
should be no cognitive dissonance - no "that doesn't seem right" 
moments. So glide walking stopped plus early level robots spin their 
eye slowly but later level ones spin like the enraged enemies they are.

Another tweak that took some time was adjusting the registration 
points of the art. All game is track by XY points. The registration 
point is where the (0,0) point of each object is. I tweaked the robots 
so their shooting was just barely good enough to hit you. This allowed 
you to dodge bolts iif you were careful. The one exception was when 
the robot come straight at you from in front, the bolt will pass 
through the one pixel high blank line at your neck. Most people panic, 
move and die. When you move the player, the body bounces up and down 
and the bullet hits you. We had one amazing player that could stop for 
just long enough to let the bolt pass through his neck then move on 
while fighting at the highest level. He practiced Kung-Fu and 
consistently got high scores.

Another game industry term is "Attract Mode" - what the game does when 
no one is playing it to attract the customer to the game. I added the 
high scores and attract mode somewhere along the way. The game was 
still black and white but we were ready to go to production.

A game came out in that month that used colored transparent ink 
printed on a black and white tube to make their game look like it was 
in color. I don't remember what game but the bosses were freaking out 
that we couldn't compete without color. We need color but we can't 
afford a new set of hardware. The engineers got busy while I lived in 
dread the changes.

Meanwhile the cabinets were starting to be built for us. We had an 
optical joystick that we designed. Simple idea - take a threaded rod 
and run it through a hole in a thick rubber sheet. Put a big washer on 
both sides of sheet, lock it with nuts, thread a handle the size of a 
male appendage on the top, add a big mirror finish washer on the 
bottom. Final bit was 4 infrared led and 4 sensors below the N,E,S,W 
sides of the washer. As soon as you learned the handle the mirror 
would reflect infrared to the sensors. Elegant design except for a 
couple problems that showed up later.

We put the black and white game out for test at an upscale singles 
bar. It did fantastically well. It was getting a ton of play by the 
women there. The boss attributed that to, "They love to yank a manly 
joysick." Who knows he may have been right! When we changed the joy 
stick to a standard Wico model about 1 inch high, female play dropped. 
We had to change the joystick during production because some player 
would pull so hard in the down direction that they would tip the 
cabinet onto themselves! Banging around the cabinet is a big no-no. 
That's why there is always a little weight on a spring behind the coin 
door. If you hit the coin door, the weight swings and closes a switch 
connected to reset on the computer. I missed the bigger stick though. 
Your grip was more solid on a stick you can get you fist around. The 
little joystick needed a finger tip hold - pretty namby-pamby for 
someone escaping from millions of enraged robots. Oh well, we couldn't 
have any players dying as pancakes either.

One player did die - not two as sometimes reported. The unfortunate 
fellow was obese and had run upstairs to play the game. The legend is 
he set a high score and died, but the owner of the arcade said he 
didn't finish the game, he was out of breath from the moment he 
arrived until he dropped. The legend is way better than reality - The 
excitement of playing a game killed the player after he set the high 
score. The desire to play games has led many a player to do stupid 
things like stay up until 5am on a final exam day. (Who me?)
It is appropriate that Berzerk and PacMan should share an issue since 
PacMan knocked Berzerk off the #1 money earner spot after its fairly 
long reign.

********************************
How did we know to say "Coin detected in pocket"?
- The game makes good use of sound for 1980, and is one of the 
earliest games with speech. How did the use of speech and samples come 
to be in the game, and what do you think this added to the overall 
effect? How difficult was it to create the speech in those days? How 
did you choose the words and phrases, and what process was used? I 
always loved the 'robotic' speech in games such as Berzerk and Wizard 
of Wor - very creepy, but was this intentional (in terms of how it 
sounded), or a restriction imposed by the technology of the time?
---------------------------

Originally Berzerk just had pinball type sounds. It was one or two 
counters connected to an amplifier. If you put in a small number, it 
would make a hing pitch square wave. A big number would take longer to 
count down to zer, so it would be lower in tone. It was just about 
impossible to make music with it. But we had used that scheme in 
pinball for a year and I had quite a few zappy and tweepy sounds 
already in my program library.

A salesman visited us during the Development of Berzerk with a "speech 
chip" for intended for helping blind people. They were hoping to get 
it into toys or games. It sounded very robotic and was limited to 24 
(or less?) fixed words of vocabulary. It was using custom hardware to 
make hisses and tones that assembled into words. 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 great in large quantities. The boss said, "could you use 
it?" I was on it right away. The interface was simple - feed it a 
number that indexed the word and a pitch number then wait until the 
busy_talking bit cleared. The trick was getting more sentences out of 
it. I wanted the robots to sound like they were hunting you. I wrote 
up a bunch of sentences but then decided the best result for the small 
number of words would be to use the construction: <killing-verb> the 
<player-noun>. I used a big thesaurus to find synonyms of "destroy". 
The player noun wasn't quite as simple. I thought of ways the robots 
might describe the player: intruder, and human came to mind right away.

One of the engineers would run thru the maze rooms with out shooting 
any robots. I decided to add in an extra player-noun just for him: 
Chicken! Anytime you left live robots in the previous room, the next 
rooms robots would taunt you with "Kill the chicken", "Destroy the 
chicken" etc. It was quite enjoyable to see the chicken taunt annoying 
him and other players.

When I assembled the list of nouns and verbs, I had 3 words left and I 
had one sentence I really wanted on the chip so I drop one verb and 
added "Coin detected in pocket". It was inteneded to encourage replay. 
One bar patron actually said, "How did it know I still have some 
quarters?" and he played until he didn't have quarters to find out! I 
was surprised how many people thought there was a special coin 
detector in the cabinet.

The engineers finished their "color" upgrade. It was odd. They made a 
"color overlay" video layer at much cruder resolution than the screen. 
Each color chip cover 4x4 area of the black and white pixels. Each 
color pixel/tile had 4 bits for color - R G B and dim. I don't 
remember if they implemented the "dim" colors. It was in an completely 
different place in memory. I wasn't happy that I had to deal with 
"Kludge Kolor" as I named it. The engineers argued about how many 
cents they were saving per game and that it would cheaper to let me 
work a year on the code than to add a dollar of cost.

At least the tiles were the same size as the walls thickness. I had to 
change the object drawing routines to take a color. It painted the 
color chips over the walls, robots and player. One problem with Kludge 
Kolor was if the player and robot got within 4 pixels of each other, 
some bit of the robot would change to player color. You usually were 
dead before you could notice.

- How did you playtest the game? It's pretty tough! (But then, it is 
an arcade game, designed to relieve people of their cash!) Still, to 
counter that, there's at least the 'invincible bow-tie' effect, if 
you're shot through the neck by a robot!
* see previous chunks about the testing arcade *

- What hardware did you use to create the game? Did the kit you had 
limit your ideas in any way?

The development system was made by Tektronix. It has a "pod" with a 
cable that plugged into the Z80 socket. It had two 8" floppy drives. 
It had one editor "ed" - yup the same awful ed you can play with in 
Linux! It was easy to delete the wrong line in that editor. The only 
other tools were: an assembler, a linker, a loader and a crude 
debugger. The disk utilities were like CP/M (or DOS).

The game hardware was a simple black & white frame buffer - set a bit 
in memory and the pixel turns on. It had a "bit shifter" to help shift 
the graphic data as it was being written into memory. Otherwise the 
Z80 would have to do the bit shifting - one instruction cycle per bit 
shifted. Having the Z80 do the work would have made byte aligned 
patterns move faster than ones shifted 7 bits over.

The CPU was a Z80, with 512 bytes of battery backed up RAM, the screen 
ram, the color overlay ram, and 8K of ROM.

There were 16 bits that could be connected to switches. The joystick 
took 4 bits, plus there were all the buttons and the coin switches. 
Coin switches were a pain in the rear. Sometime they would "bounce", 
giving 2 on/off for one coin. There was extra code in every coin op 
game to make sure that coins got counted correctly. There was an 
electro-mechanical counter inside the door that counted the coins 
dropped in. That was a precaution against "skimming the coin box" 
where some bar owners would take some quarters out (skim) before the 
game operator showed up to collect, count and split the take with the 
bar owner. Outputs on Berzerk were the luminescence video (black and 
white) and the chroma video (color info), the sound counters, and the 
voice chip's word and pitch.

The price of color monitors was much higher that B&W. The engineers 
ruled out many things based on cost. I would have liked to design from 
the start in color instead of having it put in during the last month. 
It would have been nice if the sounds added together like real sounds 
but that would have taken more hardware or hardware multiplication.

The kit definitely constrained the design but all kits do even a PC 
with DX10. You could claim that your flying game really need a wrap-
around screen system and a motion platform. If you work in the US 
defense industry you might get that kit but even then you might 
complain that you need 6 gravity continuous lateral forces. 
Constraints actually are good for design. Every game doesn't needs 
super realistic 3D rendering to be fun. I'd argue the 3D constrains 
you too. Often you start out all happy with the 3D world but end up 
playing the game in 2D map mode because the 3D world gets boring and 
isn't vitally important. I had that problem with MacroMedia MazeWars - 
when playing the radar was most important and the 3d view ignored.

SIDELINE - probably should be elsewhere: I was the first person to 
sign a game. It said in the bottom right corner "Designed and 
Programmer by Alan McNeil (using my signature)" I came from an Art/
Design background and thought a work of art should be signed by the 
artist. Getting royalties might be a better idea.

- Presumably, there's no 'ending' to the game?
It's open ended. There are 65767 rooms to visit. The edges wrap around 
after 256 rooms in X or Y.

- What was the response to the game when it was released?
The game did extremely well. URL/Stern started with one shift a day 
making game. Soon they were running 3 shifts a day. A vaguely remember 
someone telling me that we were making a game every 5 minutes. They 
sold for $600 wholesale to the distributors that marked it up at least 
30%. I don't know how many Berzerks were made total but it was 
thousands. It did so well because the operators loved it for its 
repeat play draw and lasting power. Some games would be played out in 
a month when kids would get easily bored with them but they always 
came back to Berzerk. PacMan spelled the end of Berzerk's dominance 
but even then it was earning well for operators.

- Did you have anything to do with the home conversions? How did you 
think they fared (if you saw any of them)?

I had nothing to do with the home version - Atari didn't even ask for 
the code. The first I heard of the deal was through a boss who said 
Stern sold the right to make the home game to Atari for 4 million 
dollars. Intellectual Property Capitalism at its finest! My salary at 
the time 30K$. That planted the idea that I shouldn't work for any 
company because no matter how friendly the boss, they aren't your 
friend, they are your slave master. Don't get me started on my rant 
about how corporations are immortal emergent life-forms that are 
inimical to life on this planet.

I didn't like the home version, the play was off because they didn't 
have the right values for all those tweaks and it looked cruder.

- Is there anything you left out of the game that you wish you could 
have included?
[Note this part builds into the how and why of FRENZY happening]

I had a couple vague desires but was pretty tired after the hardware 
guys next request: Cocktail table Berzerk. They said we need a table 
version that you can set drinks on and sit around. It should be a two 
player version and allow the players to sit opposite each other. Of 
course that will require flipping the screen for the second player. 
"Fine, put in a relay to flip the screen." Within an hour the 
engineers were back with "Too expensive, We could let you work on it 
for a year or two for the cost to do it in hardware." Yeah maybe at 
$30,000. So back to the code to try to figure out flipping the screen. 
I added a flag for "flipped" and checked it all over the code to 
change things. The code then went over 8K maximum for the ROM's by 
just a few bytes. I remember changing the copyright notice in the ROM 
to be shorter. There were German and French translation in the ROM of 
a few important phrases like "Insert Coin".

By that time, I was also in charge of eight programmers. They were 
driving me pretty hard. I was a bit resentful. The boss noticed and 
raised my salary to $36K. He gave out a bonus that year too. That 
caused all my programmers to want raises and bonuses. I worked on all 
kinds of pinball games for a year while Berzerks were being cranked 
out in the plant. Also on a game for the "Super Cobra" hardware called 
"MoonWars". It was only tested for 5 days. It didn't do well. I was 
pissed that the wrong control had been put on the game.

I was getting more and more stressed and angry with the bosses. They 
had a theft problem about then - tubes of programmable ROM's were 
disappearing from the plant. Then a VCR disappeared from the coffee 
room. The boss was pissed and hired a goon with a lie detector. I got 
a call from the boss' secretary, "Please go to the coffee room and 
tell the detective what you remember about last Friday." Oh alright, I 
can help them out for ten minutes. When I got there, the guy asked if 
I wanted to hook me up to a lie detector. "No. There's no point." Then 
he proceeded to ask questions while hiding behind a large black box 
and constantly looking at some display, probably a voice-stress 
analyzer. When he asked me "Did you steal the VCR?" I blew my stack. 
"What?! Are you out of your mind? This ******* interview is over." I 
stormed out of there and straight downstairs into the CEO's office and 
asked him if he was out of his mind. He tried to mollify me but I 
remained steamed far into that night.

A month later they fired the VP of manufacturing and two associates. 
They had been smuggling chips out and reselling them to us! What a 
scam and all from his right hand man. Do you wonder why I have a low 
opinion of CEO's?

Sometime in spring the CEO went on a trip to Japan to see Konami. 
Before he left, he called a meeting of the heads of a few departments 
tell us to work on evaluations of our "peons". When he came back he 
called my to confer about the salaries on my guys. It was weird. I was 
trying to help my guys. I told him what I thought he should give as 
raises for each guy and said it would depend on bonuses too. He 
behaved like there wasn't a penny to give and said, "You know that guy 
that did Space Invaders? They didn't pay him any bonuses, they just 
gave him a watch and he liked it! I should do that." I said, "You 
actually think the guys will go for that?" It was too much. He was 
going to screw my team. I slammed by attache case shut and said, 
"That's it. I quit." I went straight to my desk, packed quickly and 
headed home. That night the CEO called and said, "Are you done with 
your tif?" "No it's a permanent tif." I was done with the idiots or so 
I thought until the call that started Frenzy.

- What do think Berzerk's legacy is to videogaming? To me, it almost 
appears to be a proto-Robotron these days.

The authors of Robotron would probably agree now but when I asked them 
back then they said they just wanted to make a better robot game than 
mine. They said they were frustrated with Berzerk. They did Defender 
first (check that ut I think it was first).

 

 

 

  • Like 1
  • Thanks 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

That's a great read, thanks so much for sharing it! I loved Berzerk in the arcade. Revisiting it recently, I felt a bit of frustration at how slow the player moves. But it's still got awesome style and atmosphere.

 

It's interesting that he mentions the coin mechanism being tricky. For a while (back when it was new), the cabinet had metal coin slots and I was able to get free games by building up a static charge and then zapping the coin slot. (The arcade soon swapped out the metal coin slots for plastic ones.)

 

At the time, I also thought the 2600 version was pretty faithful, all things considered. I should try playing them back-to-back now to compare and contrast.

 

When I saw Eugene Jarvis speak in Seattle several years ago, he mentioned that he was playing Berzerk and he noticed that if you held the fire button down you could then use the joystick to aim your shots while standing still. From this he eventually developed the idea of being able to move and fire independently.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.
Note: Your post will require moderator approval before it will be visible.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

Loading...
  • Recently Browsing   0 members

    • No registered users viewing this page.
×
×
  • Create New...