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I just saw this episode of Atari Archive, where it mentions this bit:


"Berzerk was still a b&w game at this point, as Stern management saw no market for color games. This changed after Williams' Defender debuted, so Berzerk spent its final month of development being colorized by the use of an overlay board called Buffer System Color, capable of adding a single color over top each sprite and object."


I'm not sure about that timeline, as Arcade-History says Defender was shown at AMOA Chicago October 31st, 1980 and released a week or two later on November 15th, 1980.


Arcade-History says Berzerk was released on November 12th, 1980:


The idea for a black-and-white game was abandoned when the color game Defender was released earlier the same year to significant success. At that point Stern decided to use a color overlay board for Berzerk. A quick conversion was made, and all but the earliest versions of the game shipped with a color CRT display..

Videogamehistory has this bit:


The idea for a black-and-white game was abandoned when the color game Defender was released earlier the same year to significant success. At that point Stern decided to use a color overlay board for Berzerk. A quick conversion was made, and all but the earliest versions of the game shipped with a color CRT display.

I have an older version of MAME and the trivia info says it was released in October 1980. Either way, I think the story about Stern management being motivated to make Berzerk color from seeing Defender at the AMOA show can't be true.

The version of this story from RetroGamer magazine (#47 Feb 2008 - article attached) mentions an unnamed b&w game with color gels on the tube that had Alan McNeil's bosses "freaking out" and thought Berzerk couldn't compete without color. Stern's hardware engineers made a 'color overlay' video layer, but with a much cruder resolution than what the game originally generated. This is why when you get close to a wall or a robot, the color sometimes transfers from your character to the walls and robots.

Does anyone know how many Berzerk were made with the b&w monitor? It could be 1, or 10 (if those were just test production models), or 100 or more if the production line was configured to make b&w versions, considering Stern would have needed quite a fewl b&w monitors on hand.

I've never even seen a photo of a b&w version, has anyone? The color overlay board had to be something that could quickly be added to the existing hardware, so it would be interesting to know if someone removed it and reconfigured the hardware to use a b&w monitor.
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