Flyers: Arcade Flyer Art Saturday: Berzerk
In 1980, the Stern company came up with it's fist bonafide video game arcade hit, Berzerk. The game was distinctive for many reasons, not the least of which is being the first game to have a talking feature. In the game you play a "humanoid" who is being chased around the maze levels by angry killer robots. Touching the walls, robots or getting shot by robots spelled instant death. Your job is to exterminate all the robots on the level so you can move on to the next. there were 64,000 different levels, each one harder than the last. But you better be quick with your killing or along comes Evil Otto, a sort of smiley faced orange that would bounce around and threaten to kill you. Evil Otto was indestructible and would try to block your escape to the next level.
As I mentioned before, Berzerk was the fist arcade game to introduce a talking function. The machine itself would entice players to the machine by tossing out uips like "Quarters detected in pockets." Once in the game, the robots and Evil Otto both had catchy dialogue such as "Kill the Humanoid" and "Intruder Alert." If you allowed Evil Otto to chase you out of the level before all the robots were killed, you would be taunted with the ever insulting "Chicken, fight like a robot."
According to KLOV, Berzerk also holds the dubious distinction of being the first game to be blamed for the death of a player. Allegedly in 1981, a nineteen year old boy dropped dead of a heart attack right after he finished playing the game. Another story exists of an eighteen year old boy who also died of a massive heart attack directly after scoring two of the top ten spots on a Berzerk machine's leaderboard. Believe it, or not!
This flyer is hilarious with it's real life preppy hero and girlfriend dropped Tron style into the game itself. It features the killer robots, Evil Otto and the world famous stellar dialogue from the game in its many iterations. You almost feel like you're there! "How are we going to get out of this one?" our hero asks. "The answer's on the back." replies our hiding heroine. Turning over the flyer to reveals a picture of the cabinet and a sales pitch that includes "Unsurpassed 30 word vocabulary," and a "Newly designed Joy Stick that allows you to move the humanoid figure in 8 different directions." (Ah, the innovation was truly astounding.) And then for some reason a small portion of the flyer was printed upside down reading "You'll really flip overthis game too," with an upside down Stern logo to compliment it. Now, that's what I call berzerk!
Flyer courtesy TAFA