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Is This the Real Polybius?

Nostalgia Nerd | December 30, 2025



Head to https://squarespace.com/nostalgianerd to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain using code NOSTALGIANERD ~ Berzerk, an arcade game designed by Stern Electronics, was apparently responsible for three deaths during the 1980s. Jeff Dailey, Peter Bukowski and Edward Clark Jr. were all supposed victims to this intense arcade machine. In this video, I attempt to substantiate the facts and discover whether any of this is true.

Read the web version at https://www.nostalgianerd.com/did-berzerk-kill-three-people/

⌚Timings⌚
00:00-04:31 Berzerk
04:31-05:55 Jeff Dailey
05:55-09:06 Peter Bukowski
09:06-09:57 SqSp
09:57-12:43 Edward Clark Jr.
12:43-28:32 Exploring the Facts
28:32-30:34 Truth
30:34-35:05 Video Games Article
35:05-36:09 Just one more thing…
36:09-36:40 Credits

🔗Video Links🔗
Retrobitch – https://retro-bitch.com/2015/11/04/dying-to-play-the-berzerk-curse-fact-or-fiction/
Usenet Post – https://groups.google.com/g/alt.games.mame/c/ex-lLxU2ouA/m/T-KtKmZjLzMJ
arcade-history.com – https://web.archive.org/web/20250000000000*/arcade-history.com
arcade-history Berzerk – https://www.arcade-history.com/?n=berzerk&page=detail&id=236
classicgaming.com – https://web.archive.org/web/20021126091232/http://www.classicgaming.com/rotw/bezerk/
thedoteaters – https://thedoteaters.com/?bitstory=bitstory-article-2/berzerk
Death of a Video Gamer article – https://home.hiwaay.net/~lkseitz/cvg/death.html
Ghostinmymachine – https://theghostinmymachine.com/2024/01/29/encyclopaedia-of-the-impossible-the-cursed-berzerk-video-game-arcade-cabinet/
littlebitsofgaming – https://littlebitsofgaming.com/2019/10/27/berzerk-the-killer-arcade-game/

Some online news sources;
Chicagotribune: https://web.archive.org/web/20240518042345/https://www.chicagotribune.com/1988/03/22/youth-charged-in-stabbing-death/

Smiley water tower – https://www.reddit.com/r/LiminalSpace/comments/14rhqri/smiley_face_water_tower_calumet_city_il/

Other links and references can be found at https://www.nostalgianerd.com/did-berzerk-kill-three-people/

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Errors and omissions excepted.

Some material in this video may be used under Fair Dealing / Fair Use. Where under section 107 of the Copyright Act of 1976 (UK: Sections 29 and 30 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988), allowance is made for purposes including parody, quotation, criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, education and research. Fair Dealing / Fair use is a use permitted by copyright statute that might otherwise be infringing.

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Written by Nostalgia Nerd

Comments

This post currently has 45 comments.

  1. @catdespira2238

    December 30, 2025 at 6:53 am

    Thank you for citing me for my research. Few ever do. People just continually plagiarize me and take credit for my work. I am grateful for your acknowledgment.

    Subbed.

    P.S. How did I know about the second death at Friar Tuck's? I interviewed Tom Blankely, the owner, who I was introduced to by Walter Day, founder of Twin Galaxies. I also interviewed one of the arcade attendants present that night.

  2. @kerbal666

    December 30, 2025 at 6:53 am

    Ahoy touched on this in his video on Polybius a few years back. Good to have a deep dive into the actual facts of the story. Once again, realising it was the media all along making stuff up.

    EDIT: 8 YEARS AGO!! The void is ever closer…

  10. @DarkBlueBaker

    December 30, 2025 at 6:53 am

    I semi joke that I want to go out playing Berzerk. I think it would be the cherry on top of my gaming life. I've already told the important people that if I'm conscious in hospice, I want a 2600 and a copy of the game ready to play. I insist on original hardware because that's where I started.

  14. @RetroLessons

    December 30, 2025 at 6:53 am

    This video genuinely gave me chills… I’ve heard rumors about this game before, but seeing you break down the story in detail made it feel even more unsettling. The way you balance mystery with facts is what makes your content stand out.

    If I could suggest one thing, it’d be awesome to see you dive deeper into psychological factors or urban legend culture behind stories like this in future videos. I think it’d add an extra layer of depth.

    Either way, thanks for another gripping video! Keep them coming.

  18. @williamharris8367

    December 30, 2025 at 6:53 am

    I am very surprised that someone was still playing Bezerk in 1988! By that point, it was long gone from the local arcades where I lived, supersceded by much newer games. I wonder how it managed to generate enough revenue to justify its existence.

  20. @BigPlatinumDragon

    December 30, 2025 at 6:53 am

    If death by heart attack can be blamed on a video game someone was playing, then why isn't driving a car blamed for heart attacks which occur when someone is driving? or better yet why not blame sleeping o sitting on the couch when a heart attack happens during these activities?

  25. @guessundheit6494

    December 30, 2025 at 6:53 am

    You mentioned Chase (*) influencing Berzerk, but it would have also been worth mentioning its influence on Castle Wolfenstein. Silas Warner liked Berzerk, but he wanted a slower, cerebral maze game based on espionage or World War II. Castle Wolfenstein is why we got Wolfenstein 3D, DOOM, Quake, and everything that followed. (* Chase dates back to 1970, either the first or one of the first shared code games.)

    The stories about Berzerk fatalities never held water, but there have been documented cases of gamers dyying while playing and people harmed by players. In August 2005, Lee Seung Seop of South Korea played StarCraft for 50 straight hours before collapsing. His demise was attributed to an embolism from sitting so long. In 2010, a South Korean couple obsessively played video games while their infant daughter starved to dtaeh. There are other known cases worldwide, not just SK.

    34:00 – Notice that it only happened with yanks and their overly litigious nature ("somebody hurt me, the world owes me money!"). It would have been worth mentioning the blame distribution of the early 1980s went after ANYTHING not mainstream but had money in it (Heavy Metal, Dungeons & Dragons). If they wanted to blame something, they should have blamed aerobics (re: artist Patrick Nagel having a heart attack and unaliving).

  28. @HeckleandJeckle-xk4qv

    December 30, 2025 at 6:53 am

    i was ounce followed by a Berserk machine back in the eighties , after i took a few corners i broke into a run and made it home alive., But for weeks after it would hang around in the park waiting for me .

  32. @dclem005

    December 30, 2025 at 6:53 am

    A few years ago I took a class in radiation safety and one of yhe things that was mentioned is that the number one place where people are found dead outside of a hospital is while they are at home. When this was first discovered it kind of freak people out and it made people wonder if there was something in our day to day activity that was more dangerous than we realized. So the problem was given to a bunch of number crunchers to see what was going on and they more or less determined that there really wasn't anything more dangerous in peoples homes than anywhere else it was just that people more often died from whatever while at home than any other place. While this a first sounded odd, the mathmatician pointed out that since people spend so much time at home it is a given that it is more likely if one is going to die either something that injuries them or due to a health issue it will be at a place you spend the most time. If you multiply that number of times people die elsewhere by the number which represents how much more the average person spends at home than there the death rate is relatively the same.

    At guess what I'm getting at is people die all the time from various issues, and we can die no matter what our age is. Even though this is common sense we can still get confused and/or frightened when people die unexpectedly and blame it on things that have no relationship to what causes a persons death. It is easy to understand how people in the 80s could believe how video games could kill you becausebit was something that parents of that period were unfamiliar with. Also the fact that given the amount of time kids and teenagers spent at arcades it is all but a given that SOMEONE was going to die there at some point in time after so many people were there (instead of at home or somewhere else) and these people spent 'x' hours there. The same thing was explained to us in the radiation safety class. The media often talks about hundreds or thousands (or hundreds of thousands) of people that die after being "exposed to radiation", consuming harmful containments in our food, etc. but what they often don't take into consideration is what is the difference between the people that are dying from this threat and that of the people who are dying day to day from everything else. If there is no statistical difference between the first group and the secound, it isn't possible to show a connection between the so called threat and an increased mortality rate in those exposed to it. And that is why certain media outlets never bother which such things in the first place. 🤔

  37. @cosmic.sage7

    December 30, 2025 at 6:53 am

    My friend in around '99 toldme of a home video game
    Simeone her daughter noted as dying from a game in
    a system. I'm clueless to details. Is there any info on that?
    It had a face they told me in a square and he watched the
    Player in the lower corner.

  38. @cosmic.sage7

    December 30, 2025 at 6:53 am

    Okay in stranger things, Will was kinda
    edging towards his ending in the arcade
    while he hosted the mindflare. It seemed
    it wanted him alive – mindflare loved the
    video-game probably. 😅

  39. @TeaAndFloppyDisks

    December 30, 2025 at 6:53 am

    Skewed information and sensationalism is a really big issue nowadays and way too many people take it at face value. Thank you for doing such extensive research and bringing the truth to light!

  41. @aristideau5072

    December 30, 2025 at 6:53 am

    The reason kids playing the arcade version with the large (red?) joystick where pulling so hard on the joystick was not the result of the game but the result of the joystick sometimes not responding so you would use more force.

  42. @BurgerMe85

    December 30, 2025 at 6:53 am

    if teens are dying from this stress, were there no adults playing it? i feel like any kid who can walk on their own feet and operate a joystick is healthier than most 40 year olds, especially in the 80s. and why always the same location? so weird

  45. @chrisball3778

    December 30, 2025 at 6:53 am

    I remember seeing lots of tabloid scare stories about the health effects of video games when I was a kid in the late 80's or early 90's. They've always attracted an element of moral panic. Photosensitive epilepsy was the biggest concern, as they genuinely do pose a risk to people with the condition, but the press made much broader, sweeping claims about how dangerous they were. It's what pushed the industry to start including the seizure warnings you still get on the loading screens of games today. For a while there was even a weird push to get kids to wear a patch over one eye while playing as it was said to cut the risk of triggering an epileptic seizure. I honestly don't know if that was supported by medical evidence. There were so many weird moral panics around that time- video games, heavy metal, ninjas, even Dungeons and Dragons.

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