Berzerk is a video game designed by Alan McNeil and released for arcades in 1980 by Stern Electronics of Chicago.

Following a task to fix some technical problems on boards, Stern allowed McNeil to develop his own game.

He slowly developed a game initially with robots, later adding the walls and the Evil Otto character to expand on the gameplay.

Stern premiered the game at the Amusement & Music Operators Association (AMOA) exposition in Chicago in late 1980.

[8] How McNeil encountered Chase is unclear: while he remembered seeing the game in Byte, it never appeared as a type-in listing in that publication.

[8][9] McNeil found work at Dave Nutting Associates, where he programmed the coin-op sequels Boot Hill and Sea Wolf II and ported Gun Fight to the Bally Professional Arcade.

[10] McNeil found new work at Stern Electronics in 1979 with the promise that, after he could fix a problem on a Bally controller board, he could develop a video game.

He used Fred Saberhagen's series Berserker for the title of the game,[11] as the novels are about robot war machines that are out to kill all biological life forms.

[14] To incentivize a player to leave a room once the robots were defeated, McNeil created the "Evil Otto" character, a bouncing happy face.

[16] During the game, the enemy robots speak audible threats, warnings, and insults whether a player fights or flees the room.

[18] The last major addition was in the final month of production: making the game in color instead of black and white.

As a black and white game, Berzerk was originally designed with translucent ink applied to the monitor screen to make it appear to be in color.

[19] Stern premiered the game at the Amusement & Music Operators Association (AMOA) exposition in Chicago which ran between October 31 to November 2, 1980.

[23] McNeil commented that "some games would be played out in a month because kids would get easily bored with them, but they always came back to Berzerk.

"[19] Tony Licata, David Pierson, and Dick Welu covered the arcade games presented at AMOA in Play Meter magazine.

Pierson found Berzerk interesting and commented that the major hindrance on the game was the controls involving the player having to use joystick for both aiming and movement.

He complimented the inclusion of Evil Otto and concluded that "people won't be able to quit playing [Berzerk].

"[30] Licata listed Atari's Battlezone (1980) as his pick for the best in the show, while stating that Berzerk was another game that really stood out.

[32][33][35] The Video Game Update also complimented the sounds and visuals, specifically when the Humanoid is electrified by robot fire or by walking into walls.

[34] While the Atari 2600 version was described as "generally well regarded" by Grannell, McNeil was not keen on the conversions, finding they lacked many of the original game's refinements.

[39] Brett Weiss of AllGame praised the original arcade game for its humor, long-term replayability and its difficulty.

[40] Weiss also gave a positive review of the 5200 port reiterating his points, while finding that the humanoid controlled a bit too slow.

[44] In 1995, Flux magazine ranked the arcade version of Berzerk at 55th place on their list of the top 100 video games of all time.

[46] IGN echoed this, stating that while the character was generally unknown to a younger generation of gamers, Evil Otto was one of the most well-known video game villains during the "Atari days".

[50] Reports in newspapers suggested that officials were investigating if the player's heart attack was due to the stress endured while playing a video game.

Jarvis described Berzerk as being "amazing" and on discovering that if you held down the shooting button, the player would not move, but could still change the direction they fired their weapon.

[56] Mike Mika developed an Atari 2600 homebrew version of Berzerk which included the digitized voice that was initially made available in 2002.