Thread:Stormlilly/@comment-3417255-20131108092627/@comment-3417255-20131112070801

Personally, I don't really get a lot of the fascination behind Berzerk, but I guess urban legends spawned by a couple freak incidences will have that effect. That coupled with the fact that I was alive while all that happened kinda makes it just another game to me. While it didn't really have anything ground breaking, it was still popular enough to maintain itself in gaming.

Now, I can understand the shock behind the statement "it even served as the basis for"... "Castle Wolfenstine, and Xybots." After all, it's not really what you think of when it comes to killing Nazis and taking on a maze of robots. While some may see it as a stretch, there's more similarities in the core game play between Xybots and Berzerk. While one features a third person view, and the other an overhead room-by-room view, both games are basically the same... all be it with the exception of keys and items in Xybots. The same also kinda applies to Castle Wolfenstine as well.

Now, I know what you might be thinking. "How does an old arcade game from 1980 have anything in common with the grand daddy of first person shooters?" That would be Wolfenstine 3D, not Castle Wolfenstine, of which 3D was more or less inspired from. Castle Wolfenstine was a top down stealth action game made for home computers back in 1981, which also made use of digitized voices for game play. It was still set in World War II, but instead of running and gunning, players had to figure out the better route in completing their objective.

As for the vocals in Berzerk, again, they were synthesized and not recorded. It's actually one of the better remembered features of the game, given how it was one of the first to feature speech synthesis (the first being Stratovox). Each word was more or less programmed into the game, much like the various other sound effects. While some of the programmed sayings were all done as one line, others were segmented and would be triggered in combination to make a complete line based what happens in the game.

As for popularizing the whole concept of competitive score based gaming, it was around relatively before Berzerk was released. The first game that had the high score system that we know and love was featured in Space Invaders, where your score was mostly based on enemies taken out, and how long they played. Even at that, high score systems were in play before that, but mostly as a target for extra play time.

On top of that, no one game really made arcades more competitive than what they already were. Arcade games, and video games, in there very nature often brings out the competitive nature in people. Walter Day (a former arcade owner) recognized this, and created the Twin Galaxies Scoreboard, which was originally published in a number of gaming publications starting around 1982. While the arcade it was based out of would later close, Twin Galaxies would continue on to become the leading authority for record high scores for video games.

Finally, as far as the net worth of Berzerk at it's height, it's rather hard to say. The game more or less came out between the video game crashes of 1977 and 1983. As a result, any popularity was more or less chalked up as just another fad. The first crash came about from the shear number of Pong clones, while the second one... well, it's the more popular one *coughETcoughPACMANhack*.

Overall, if I had to ball park the figure, I would say it was in the mid to low millions. While the speech synthesis was costly in itself, re-purposing cabinets from one game to another was something of a common practice. Generally as a way to save money on new games and recouping losses from unused or broken units. Berzerk did get dinged a couple times with problematic/defective joysticks, which led to about 4,200 canceled orders for the arcade game. While they did offer replacement kits for the joysticks free of charge, it still hurt the sales of the game. Regardless, it would go on to be Stern Electronics' most popular arcade video game.

So, to sum it all up, I don't really have any books (though I'm sure there are a number available), just personal experiences from having lived through a lot of events that happened in arcades and game rooms. The words were more or less programmed, and set to play in ether full lines, or in segments based on events during game play. Berzerk didn't popularize the idea of competitive/score-based gaming, that was already part of the culture. And finally, as far as net worth goes, it's OVER 9000 (in a very rough estimate).