BERZERK- video firsts!

Berzerk, Universal Research Laboratories/Stern Inc., 1980. Just
         passing a Berzerk machine was a new experience for most people. The
         machine actually spoke! Few people had experienced voice-synthesis at the
         time, and it made quite an impression. Because digitization was so
         expensive, the sentences spoken by Berzerk shared a vocabulary of only 30
         words. 




Berzerk Information

From: xtarelex@powergrid.electriciti.com
Newsgroups: alt.games.video.classic
Subject: Re: Arcade Berzerk
Date: Tue, 18 Oct 1994 16:58:48
Organization: ElectriCiti
Lines: 87

Following the Berzerk thread got me to remeniscing, in case anyone is interested.

Lee K. Seitz (lkseitz@seitz.b11.ingr.com) remembers the phrases better than I do.
I can't think of any he may have missed. The speech was done using LPC coding that
I believe was invented by T.I., although I remember we used a National Speech chip
in it. This was when speech and memory was expensive, so we didn't just digitize 
sounds and dump them out through a DAC. I remember it cost something like $1000
per word to have the compression done, so we tried to come up with a limited 
vocabulary which could be rearranged and reused as much as possible. There was 
some guy up in Silicon Gulch who did this stuff for a living - so it is possible
to make money while talking in a monotone.

The original hardware design used a 6809 CPU, until we found out that the externally 
clocked version (6809E) didn't work properly. We had to hustle to redo the board to
run a Z80. The local Mot rep said he was going to have the 6809E's designer shot for
 that, but I don't think that ever really happened.

Stern's management (in their infinite wisdom) did not foresee that color video games 
would take off, so we were 'directed' to develop a monochrome hardware system. Then 
suddenly Defender happened from Williams and we had to hustle again. What we did was 
to come up with a color overlay board which would map the screen into 4 x 4 or 8 x 8 
(I don't remember anymore) pixel blocks. If the monochrome frame buffer output was a 
'1', the color in the overlay RAM was used. Otherwise it was black. This is why when 
the rooms move the walls change color. We called this board the BSC (Bullsh*t color), 
but the real name was Buffer System, Color.

The frame buffer used refresh spec fallout 4K x 1 DRAMs. These were cheap and easy to 
get at the time because all the manufacturers had problems meeting the refresh specs. 
Since we read out data during all lines, refresh was no problem. This idea was originated 
on the original Midway monochrome 8080 based games - Gunfight, Seawolf, etc.

There was no object to the game other than to survive and kill as many robots as possible. 
As the game progressed, the rooms got more intricate and more any more robots showed up. 
You had to kill all the robots before the exit doors would open. Evil Otto came out faster 
as the game progressed.

The game was named after the Sci-Fi novel 'Berzerkers' by I believe Fred Saberhagen. It's 
a novel about robots which go Berzerk and kill everybody. I remember we came up with the 
name while caught in a traffic jam on Chicago's Kennedy expressway.

Evil Otto was invented to convince you to leave the room after you killed all the robots. 
Otherwise, people would have a tendency to hang around. We wanted to kill you off ASAP so 
as to get the replay. By the way, Evil Otto was named after a guy by the name of Dave Otto, 
who worked for the company all of us worked for before joining Stern/URL. This company did 
R&D for Midway, and was respnsible for the first Midway processor-based games. We also worked 
on the aborted Bally Professional Arcade, one of the first home vid systems. Otto was the 
co-owner's gopher. We used to call him the sherrif, since he was an ex rent-a-cop and was 
responsible for security, toilet paper, coffee, etc.

Berzerk was the most popular American-designed video game done by Stern. I think we built 
somewhere between 30,000 and 50,000. We would have built more but we had serious problems 
with the original joystick - which used opto-reflector devices. The joystick was designed 
to pass the baseball bat test - smack it with a baseball bat and if it survived we figured 
that it would last on location - how wrong we were. What happened was that the rubber piece 
that formed a liquid seal (barf, beer, etc) was gorund down by the action of the joystick rubbing 
against the mounting plates, and the rubber glop coated the reflective surface. Another problem 
was that the surface did not reflect directly into to optics, it went off at an angle, so the 
phototransistor didn't see all the light. It was eventually replaced by a Wico joystick. The 
numbers built were short of what Williams did with Defender which was out at the same time. 
Defender was definitely a better game.

Frenzy happened because we had some board inventory left over. We were running Astro-invaders 
(a ripoff of Invaders which we lisenced from a little known Japanese company - Konami) and it 
used a different hardware system. As I recall, the object was to nuke the nuclear reactor - then 
all the  robots would go nuts and just walk around instead of going after you - for a while.

That's all I can remember for now, if anyone is interested I'll talk to some of the guys who were 
around at the time (some of us still keep in touch) and see if there are any other things which 
might be of interest.

The only reason I remembered the phrases so well is because I have a copy of Pac-Man Fever to keep 
them in mind. Also, note that the e-mail address quoted for me is no longer valid. 

