One of the most panic-inducing villains in arcade history was a bouncing, indestructible smiley face, and it was born out of workplace spite. This episode profiles Alan McNeil, a tinkerer shaped by the PLATO computer network and a self-soldered Sol-20, who was denied the chance to design an original game at Dave Nutting Associates and then negotiated a deal with pinball maker Stern Electronics: fix their broken hardware in exchange for the freedom to build his own game.

We follow the solo development of Berserk in 1980, from its inspiration in Fred Saberhagen's Berserker novels to the coordinate-seeded maze generator that created thousands of rooms with almost no memory. We explain how slowing the robots created a camping problem, how Evil Otto was invented to solve it, why McNeil hated the have a nice day smiley face, and how a traveling s ...