Berzerk began life as a 1980 arcade machine by Stern Electronics; the version here is the Atari 2600 port that Atari itself published two years later. The recipe is as simple as they come — mazes, robots, one exit — and yet few early action games generate this much tension.

Every screen is a single room of an endless maze patrolled by robots. They shoot at you, but they are magnificently stupid: they blunder into the electrified walls and gun each other down, and exploiting that stupidity is half the game. You fire in eight directions and constantly weigh clearing a room for points against simply sprinting for the exit while your luck holds.

Lingering does not pay. Stay too long and Evil Otto appears — a bouncing smiley face that cannot be killed, passes through walls and heads straight for you. That permanent grin is exactly what makes him one of the most unnerving enemies of the early eighties.

The arcade original was famous for its speech synthesis, with robots barking “Intruder alert!” and taunting fleeing players for fighting like chickens. The 2600 cartridge cannot speak — voice had to wait for the later Atari 5200 release — but it carries the movement, the shooting and the panic over surprisingly well, and it adds a set of game variations that change the speed and aggression of your enemies.

As a score chase it holds up to this day: short lives, clear rules, and always one more room tempting you onward. Do not expect more than one brilliantly polished idea — but one is enough. It runs on oldgame.cz directly in the browser, nothing to install.