My Top 100: #54 – Berzerk

 

This is guaranteed to be the oldest game on my list, bar none.  There’s only one “first”, however, and Berzerk is the first video game I ever played.

Through your years of being, you know, a person who does things and goes places…  have you ever gone to people’s houses and thought “This house is laid out all weird.  It’s nothing like my house\my grandparent’s house\my friend’s house, and it’s all decorated differently.  What’s up with that?”

If you don’t know what I mean, then you’ll just have to humour me.

We had family friends in the Baie that had a bungalow.  I guess that’s the kind where everything is on one level…  anyway, they lived across the street from a gas station they owned, and the glow from the Petro-Canada sign would always shine red and white into their living room.  The kitchen, the TV room, the carpet, and every piece of furniture in the house was either brown or beige.  The house had a 70’s vibe to it, which I found kinda weird at the time.

The couple had a son about five years older than I was, and he had some pretty cool toys.  He thought it’d be cool if I played his Vectrex, a tiny television with a controller hooked up to it with (what looked like) a coiled-up telephone cord.  I had never played a video game before, but it couldn’t be that tough.

I grabbed that brick of a controller, and I’ve been on a path of button-mashing ever since.

 

 

*Damn sticky buttons…  oh well, at least it works.*

MineStorm is an Asteroids clone that comes loaded onto the Vectrex console, but Eric (the kid indroducing me to the thing) thought it might be a bit tough for a beginner like me.  The controls for that game are a little funky, so he was probably right.

Instead, he popped in Berzerk, a game as simple as they come.

You play as a stick fella who shoots lasers out of his stick arms.  Little R2-D2’s with stick legs walk around a room with walls, shooting at you whenever you’re in their line of sight.  If you stick around one room too long, an invincible Evil Stop Sign of Death comes bouncing along, basically urging you to get the hell out.

The Vectrex controller has an analog stick for movement and four buttons, all of them with the same function – shooting.  No wonder Eric thought I’d be alright with Berzerk‘s controls!  I *still* don’t know for sure which button does what in MineStorm, aside from the one that shoots, of course.

Not long after I was introduced to it, Eric found a new console to quench his thirst for video games.  The Commodore 64 had lots of cool games with colourful graphics, and he had graduated to that.  No more black and white vector crap!  The Vectrex was passed on to me, and I’ve cherished it as a part of my collection ever since.

Every once in a while, if I get a hankerin’ for an arcade shooter, I pop Berzerk in and shoot some tin cans into oblivion.  Classic, simple fun.