When Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney built their first arcade game, Computer Space, (released just a couple months after similar game Galaxy Game) one of the major bits of feedback they received was that it was simply too complex of a game for people to walk up and play, prompting them to refocus on making simpler games, Al Alcorn's Pong being the first result from this change in philosophy and a major hit.
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| Computer Space |
What sometimes gets lost in this history is the shared lineage of these games in the minicomputer revolution of the 60's. It's inevitable as minds get to know the rules of any system to want to start to explore the boundaries of that system and this turns rapidly into play. In computing, bored academic researchers figured out how to hook a display up to a PDP-1 and quickly started making games -- one of the first was Spacewar.
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| Space War |
Bushnell and Dabney's genius was not in inventing a space shooter, they didn't, but in figuring out how to replicate the basics of the game cheap enough to make it have a commercial chance. Galaxy Game, in comparison, used the same expensive minicomputer hardware found in the academic research setting, ensuring the games could never pay for themselves and thus not be commercial viable.
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| Tennis for Two |
Bushnell and Alcorn's later Pong repeated this pattern by adopting William Higinbotham's 1958 Tennis for Two to fit into cheap, commercial deployable hardware. Combined with the lessons learned about complex controls from Computer Space, turned Pong into a tremendously successful and highly influential game, launching Atari into the stratosphere and kickstarting the entire commercial video game industry.
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| Pong |
It didn't take long for this new industry to see a pattern: look at the world of academic research computing, boil the game down to basics, implement in cheap hardware and enjoy buckets full of quarters.
It turns out that academic computing was full of these little experimental games. On early Unix systems a game simply called Robots was a minor side project by programmer Ken Arnold (better known as the creator of Rogue which spawned its own entire genre of games that still exists to this day).
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| BSD Robots |
Robots has its own complicated history full of clones and copies. But one thing that defines it as a game is the turn-based strategy nature of the gameplay. The player can sit and deliberate over their next move as long as they wish, while enemy mines/robots slowly vector in towards the player. The game is frightfully hard, and also nearly ubiquitous on early Unix-like systems.
And so it turns out that Alan McNeil, an employee of Chicago based Stern Electronics, almost definitely had contact with the game at some point. When Stern decided to enter the new arcade video game market, in addition to its earlier pinball games, they put McNeil in charge of designing and building a game.
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| Alan McNeil |
McNeil, crediting a bad dream he had about being chased around by robots, made liberal use of Robots basic design. However he turned the game on its head. Robots is at its heart a defensive game, you move about the game screen trying to cause enemy robots to collide with themselves or obstacles scattered around the screen. McNeil, correctly sensing that this wouldn't appeal to the kind of walk-up game play needed for arcade games, armed the player with a weapon. He then expanded the obstacles into a cursory maze, got rid of some of the extra player verbs (that would have required extra buttons and controls), added some speech and finally made the game real-time instead of turn-based.
These changes, as it turns out, where just what the arcade scene needed and Bezerk was born. It hit the arcades at the end of 1980 and was an immediate hit. It's not hard to see why.
Bezerk makes the player feel like the most dangerous thing in the room. The robots are trapped in the maze with you, not the other way around. You can maneuver better than they do, fire faster and use strategies to clear the room. The robots are powerful only in numbers, but they're fairly dumb -- a valid strategy is often to trick them into walking into maze walls (which will kill you also). If you take too long, a bouncing smiley face called Evil Otto will come out and "encourage" you to move on. This keeps the game active and leaves the player with precious little time between waves of robots.
Other strategies might involve shooting enemy fire right out of the air, taking cover behind maze walls causing Otto to collide with enemy robots. In a nod back to Robots, the enemy robots will die if they collide with each other. Virtuoso players play the game aggressively and trade laser fire readily with their enemies.
Despite the lower resolution, Bezerk survives the transition to the VCS/2600 surprisingly well. This is the version I remember the best, and the sounds of the player dying still send a chill up the back of my neck. The robots can often be brutal, pumping the players electrified body full of laser shot well after death.
Bezerk for the 2600 wasn't released till 1982, a couple years after the arcade release, but the distillation of the controls down to a single button maps well to the 2600's controller. The lower resolution adds a little bit of claustrophobia to the game, though occasionally can make it feel a little cramped. It also loses the voices and diagonal shot take off at a weirdly horizontal bias making learning their angle key to success.
But these are very mild complaints, the game is fantastic, even today. It's still played competitively. The modern retro gaming movement has breathed some new life into it. Bezerk has a long legacy: Robotron 2084, Smash TV, Geometry Wars, Dead Nation, and so on. And modern gamers raised on these progeny are finding new appeal in the purity of the game design. Berzerk is not just a great game for the 2600, it's a great game today and feels surprisingly modern. It was followed by a lesser known, but no less great, sequel called Frenzy, which features several upgrades to the sparse play mechanics of Berzerk.
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