Berzerk is a conversion of the 1980 Stern Electronics arcade game of the same name. It was ported to the Atari 2600 by Dan Hitchens for Atari, Inc., who also published it. Atari 2600 Berzerk was first released in 1982.

For the time, Berzerk was an exciting game, although playing it now you do have to wonder what all the fuss was about…

The aim of the game is blast your way through rooms filled with robots and to get as high a score as possible. If you linger too long in a particular room, a bouncing smiley face will appear and chase you. This is “Crazy Otto“, the infamous invincible enemy who is there to simply harass you and make you move on.

The Atari 2600 version of Berzerk has twelve different game modes, which change things like enemy speed; rate of fire; bullet speed; how often Crazy Otto appears, and so on.

I did see someone online complaining that diagonal shooting doesn’t work in this version, but I managed to use it with no problems. It’s a very useful feature.

With much more sophisticated twin-stick shooters now available, Berzerk definitely looks long in the tooth by today’s standards. The truth be told: it’s still pretty good fun to play now.

More: Berzerk on Wikipedia