Usenet, Part 2

The Stranger

This post contains the Berzerk-themed story that my Dad wrote to someone that purchased an Atari 2600 Berzerk label from him, probably from a Usenet auction.

Berzerk also happened to be my Dad’s favorite game. It was always the one he would go to the on Atari 2600. I personally preferred space shooting games such as Space Invaders, Asteroids and Galaga.

If you’ve never seen Berzerk, it is pretty simple. Originally released as an arcade game in 1980, the premise is that you are trapped in a world with killer robots led by evil Otto. Each screen has several robots, electrified walls and exits. You want to kill as many robots as you can before evil Otto appears (which happens if you take too long to exit), but can exit at any time through one of the exits to get to another screen.

The graphics are simple. You control a stick figure that can shoot in eight directions. The robots are rather dumb and will walk towards you, shooting faster and faster on later levels. To kill a robot, you can shoot it or trick it to walk into an electrified wall or another robot. You can die by touching a robot, getting shot by one, touching an electrified wall or by evil Otto touching you.

One cool feature of the arcade game version is the “Intruder Alert” message that is spoken when evil Otto appears.

With that background out of the way, here is my Dad’s story (with some very minor editing).