Berzerk

Berzerk is 1980 robot paranoia: you guide a small human through an endless maze of rooms, and every screen fills with robots that want you dead. They march toward you in formation, they fire when you linger, and when you take too long a smiley-faced ball of doom called Evil Otto bounces in from the wall and chases you at your own speed - forever, unstoppably, grinning.

It is one of the first games with digitized speech: 'Intruder alert', 'Kill the humanoid', 'Get the humanoid' - the robots talk, and hearing an arcade machine taunt you in 1980 was genuinely new. The maze rooms are randomized, walls kill on contact (your bullets included - shooting a wall and standing near it is a classic suicide), and score scales with how many robots you take with you before running. Its DNA is everywhere: it directly inspired Frenzy, and its humanoid-versus-rooms formula is an obvious ancestor of Robotron-era wave shooters. Simple, mean, and still very playable.

• ▸Randomized room mazes with robots that hunt in formation
• ▸Evil Otto - the unstoppable grinning chaser with your speed
• ▸Digitized robot speech ('Intruder alert!') in 1980
• ▸Walls that kill everything, including your own bullets