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Berzerk (video game)

1980 video game

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General referenceInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionSep 25, 2026
Entity authoritySource title only
Source-derived summary

Berzerk is a 1980 maze and shooter video game developed and published by Stern Electronics for arcades. The game involves a Humanoid Intruder who has to escape maze-like rooms that are littered with robots which slowly move toward and shoot at the Humanoid. The player can shoot at the robots to try to escape the room. Along with the robots, a smiley face known as Evil Otto appears to hunt down the player within each room.

Editorial summary

“Berzerk (video game)” enters the record as 1980 video game. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Berzerk, video and game can confirm, complicate or overturn.

Editorial reviewA practical starting point whose main value is the path it opens into stronger specialist and primary sources. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1980—that can be checked directly. The selected authority fields contribute no independent date. Its strongest next move is a source search built around Berzerk, video and game.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

“Berzerk (video game)” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Berzerk, video and game provides the most credible route into that argument.

Evidence profile

The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 25, 2026. The first chronological checks are 1980.

Critical limits

A concise general-reference account can conceal disagreements about scope, terminology or the weight assigned to individual sources. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “Berzerk (video game)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.