Atari 2600
1982
Like Asteroids, Atari’s Berzerk is a port of a popular arcade game. Unlike Asteroids, actually, unlike most Atari games, this is a prety close port of the original. Unfortunately, what’s being ported is a fairly crap game.
I guess you’d say that Berzerk is an overhead run ‘n gun game. You are a dude in a maze shooting robots that are trying to shoot you, which is the sort of scenario I like to encourage. This game was probably mindblowingly cool in 1982.
But this is 2008, and I can’t help but notice that there is only one kind of robot. And the maze is generated randomly. And if you touch anything, you die. And the random generation means you will die cheaply sometimes. And by “sometimes” I mean “often.” And if you die the game makes an unusually annoying electrocution sound. Seriously, that annoying sound effect is the most memorable part of this game.
Y’know, this is a game that is simple enough to feel boringly easy, while also being cheap enough to feel unfairly difficult. That’s a good trick.
Despite being a pretty crappy game, Berzerk does have some charm. For one thing, the robots are extraordinarily stupid, constantly shooting each other and walking into the death walls. I choose to view that bloody-minded robot behavior as a feature not a bug. The really crazy thing about the game is that if you dally too long in one room, you will be chased by an unkillable bouncing smiley face. The smiley face is named Evil Otto. I dare you not to love that.
In recent years we’ve made gains in technical capabilities and in game design allowing for much better robots-in-a-maze-scenarios. However, we’ve lost something along the way, and that something is evil unkillable smiley faces. Designers, take note.
