If you were in any arcade worth its salt in the early 1980s then you were familiar with Berzerk’s stylized “attract mode” robotic speech proclaiming “coins detected in pockets!”

Here’s the thing — it really did know when there were coins in your pockets. It knew everything about you.

It knew you stole that dollar off your parents’ bedside table to buy a mini Rubik’s Cube at the flea market that took over the local mall on Sundays. It knew you convinced that stupid kid in your neighbourhood that three pennies for a quarter was a good deal because he got three coins instead of one. It knew you trespassed and used the drainage tunnel under the highway to get to the Burger King faster. It knew you pretended to like the weird kid across the street in the hopes he’d invite you to play his father’s pinball machine in his basement bar. It knew you rode your bike down the big hill you were forbidden to go on. It knew you were trading your Colecovision cartridges with the bad kids at school without permission from your parents. It knew you fooled your parents into thinking the NES was some educational add-on for the C64.

It knew all these things and more and that’s why you played it.

Berzerk was blackmailing you one quarter at a time.