Something you may not know about me - I’m a hardcore gamer. I cut my teeth on pinball machines back in the 70's and I’m still going strong today with about six different consoles in my house plus a working C64 that I use to play games like Last Ninja and California Games. So when Turtle and I were talking and the subject of video games came up and he said ‘let’s write about arcade game tonight’ I jumped at the chance. And then he started bombarding me with links to Pong. Yea, I get it. I’m old. Thanks. But let me tell you, dude. Pong ruled. You may think it was just a simple game where you hit a white dot back and forth against two lines that were supposed to be people, but there was a lot more involved. It was social commentary. It was all about the futility of life, the dawning awareness you get at 3am when you realize that this is all there is, just a back and forth, back and forth, never ending game of throw and catch. Well, hell. I had to find some way to make that game interesting. I tried to turn it into a game about the Cold War, but no matter how hard I squinted, I couldn’t make Player 1 look like Kruschev.

I lived in arcades for more years than I care to mention. I can’t imagine how many quarters I dropped into those machines. I kinda miss those days. The thrill of stuffing a paycheck's worth of quarters into a slot. Spending almost entire days controlling joysticks and trackballs, mashing buttons and shooting insects and riding ostriches. I played every game out there, from Death Race to Galaxian to Tron and Dragon’s Lair and Ghosts and Goblins and Tempest and Defender and, well, you get the point.

There's one game that sticks out in my mind from those days.. This was around the time I was graduating high school and you would think I’d start behaving more like a grown up and less like a kid jacked up on speed and quarters who spent her school lunch hour in the local pizza place pressing buttons and jonesing for a high score. But no. The lure of the games was just too much. Nothing could pull me away from that pizza place, or the 7-11 or the arcade. And especially not the local bar (whose name escapes me) where a game called Berzerk sat in a dusty corner, begging for my quarters.

“Intruder Alert! Intruder Alert!” I can still hear that loud and clear in my head as if I was still standing there, beer balanced on a barstool pulled up next to the machine, quarters laid out in a row as if to say to anyone else “This is my place. I’m not leaving. Don’t even think that you are going to get anywhere near this game tonight. Cause I am on fire and fucking Evil Otto is going to die a brutal death this evening.”

Except Evil Otto could not be destroyed. I knew this, knew this was how the game worked and there was nothing I could do about it, but that did not stop me, especially when I was drunk, from thinking that one more quarter, one more game, would let me somehow find some deep, dark secret hidden deep within the code that would let me destroy Otto. I was at war with this evil overlord. He haunted my sleep. He kept me awake even when the bedspins would die down. Do you know what Evil Otto looked like? He looked like this: Evil fucking Otto was a bouncing smiley face. Oh, don’t let that smile deceive you. You could feel the evil oozing from Otto. You knew he was bad despite the happy grin.

This game was frustrating to say the least. You couldn’t touch anything. Not a wall, not a robot and especially not Evil Otto. You just had to maneuver your humanoid around and hope that all the robots would kill each other off and you could escape into an opening in the wall before Otto bounced into you.

“Chicken! Fight like a robot!” What? Is this game mocking me? “Fuck you!” I would yell back at the machine every time that voice called me a chicken. If I was drinking vodka, I might kick the game or threaten the disembodied voice with bodily harm to both it and its mother. If I was drinking rum, I would just feel hurt and cry. “I am not a chicken! I am not a chicken!” Someone would come over and hand me a shot of something fiery and I’d throw it back, take a deep breath and challenge Evil Otto to come get me, motherfucker. When I would actually kill all the robots and escape through an opening, the voice would say “The humanoid must not escape!” Dude, that’s kinda scary. I mean, especially if I had been smoking pot and was all paranoid about Evil Otto killing me in my sleep to begin with. Now this voice is yelling out that I must not escape? I would rather it call me a chicken. That’s freaking creepy.

You think I’m a wuss for being afraid of a stupid bouncing smiley face? Check this out:

Berzerk was the first video game known to have been involved in the death of a player. In January 1981, 19-year-old Jeff Dailey died of a heart attack soon after posting a score of 16,660 on Berzerk. In October of the following year, Peter Burkowski made the Berzerk top-ten list twice in fifteen minutes, just a few seconds before also dying of a heart attack at the age of only 18.

See, dude? Otto was indeed evil. He still shows up in my dreams once in while. "Intruder alert!" -M

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