Posted by Devin de Gruyl on Dec 4th, 2009
Story #8: Someone actually died while playing Berzerk.
There is, unfortunately, nothing fanciful – or funny – about this tragic story, one of the earliest tangible examples that video games could in fact be harmful in ways even misguided parents’ groups couldn’t fathom.
Released in 1980, Berzerk was one of the most popular maze shooters of the Golden Age, in which you guided your little stick-figure man through an endless labyrinth filled with killer robots, electrified walls, and an invincible bouncing smiley-face dubbed “Evil Otto” that’d chase you down if you took too long to move to the next screen. Contact with anything, in fact, would kill you instantly. It was a very simple game (most of the best Golden Age titles were), but it struck a chord with players of the day, ultimately becoming popular enough to have a track dedicated to it on the famous Pac-Man Fever album. Even today, veterans of the era still fondly recall Berzerk as one of the early examples of a DOOM-style shooter (even if it was in 2D overhead), and for its mocking digitized voice, which sounded suspiciously like a Cylon from Battlestar Galactica, droning “Intruder alert! Intruder alert!” and taunting “chicken” players to “Fight like a robot!” There was even speech during the attract mode, when the machine would randomly say “Coin detected in pocket” as you walked past it.
With its mostly dark screen, ever-increasing difficulty level, and frenzied action, Berzerk was definitely one of the most intimidating games of its time.
Perhaps it was too intimidating.
In 1981, Berzerk was involved in the most horrifying incident imaginable for any video game… the death of a player. And not just in the sense of killing an onscreen graphic representing the player, either… I mean the actual human being playing the game died.
In January of ’81, 19-year-old Jeff Bailey had just finished a respectable playing of Berzerk, and not long afterward he suffered a fatal heart attack. (Perhaps most chilling of all, Jeff’s score on that game was 16,660…) This was certainly bad enough, but just ten months later, it happened again. That October, 18-year-old Peter Burkowski of Calumet City, Illinois, had managed to get his initials on Berzerk‘s vanity board twice in the span of fifteen minutes… then, just moments later, he too suffered a sudden heart attack and died. Both Jeff and Peter, incidentally, were physically healthy, alcohol- and drug-free kids at the times of their deaths, making what happened to them even more inexplicable.
To this day, no one has any explanation as to how this could have happened. It is worth noting that these are the only two fatalities ever directly attributed to the video game world, unless you want to go the Jack Thompson route. If there were something about Berzerk, or any other game, that could have proven potentially harmful to players, surely there would have been more than just two who suffered the consequences. It’s entirely possible that both Jeff and Peter had pre-existing heart conditions that the medical science of 1981 couldn’t detect, and the fact they both died after playing the same game was nothing more than an unfortunate coincidence.
But the image of Berzerk as a “killer” is awfully hard to dislodge from the mind.
As a parting note, it is possible that this sad story served as partial inspiration for a video game-themed segment of the 1983 horror-anthology film Nightmares, in which an arcade-addicted teen (a young Emilio Estevez) finds himself obsessed with reaching the 13th and final level of Bishop of Battle, a fictional game that was, as it happened, eerily similar to Berzerk in many respects (though the title suggests a takeoff on Wizard of Wor). When Estevez finally gets to the mythical 13th level, the game’s enemies come to life and chase him through the mall, until the titular Bishop himself finds him and presumably kills him, trapping his soul within the game. There’s no evidence to suggest a connection between Nightmares and the real-life Berzerk tragedies, of course, but it’s certainly conceivable it was on someone’s mind when that segment was scripted. Some may even suggest that the roots of the Polybius urban legend can be found here, as well.
Verdict: Sadly, FACT.
Related posts:
- Retro-Active: The Five Best (And Five Worst) Retro Console Controllers
- Retro-Active: Gridiron Games of Antiquity
- Retro-Active: R.O.B.
- Retro-Active: NES “First Sequel” Syndrome
- Retro-Active: Consoles That REALLY Never Made It
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Related posts:
- Retro-Active: The Five Best (And Five Worst) Retro Console Controllers
- Retro-Active: Gridiron Games of Antiquity
- Retro-Active: R.O.B.
- Retro-Active: NES “First Sequel” Syndrome
- Retro-Active: Consoles That REALLY Never Made It
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