According to the interweb deity, Wikipidia:"Evil Otto" was named for Dave Otto, security chief at McNeil's former employer Dave Nutting Associates. According to McNeil, Otto would, "[smile] while he chewed you out." He would also lock McNeil and his fellow employees out of the building to enforce a noon-hour lunch, as well as piping "beautiful" music into every room. ... The function of Evil Otto, represented by a bouncing smiley face, is to quicken the pace of the game. Otto is unusual with regard to games of the period, in that there is no way to kill him. Otto can go through walls with impunity, and is attracted to the player character. If robots remain in the maze Otto moves slowly, about half as fast as the humanoid, but he speeds up to match the humanoid's speed once all the robots are killed. Evil Otto moves exactly the same speed as the player going left and right but he can move faster than the player going up and down; thus, no matter how close Otto is, the player can escape as long as they can avoid moving straight up or down. After 5,000 points Evil Otto doubles his speed, moving as fast as the player while robots remain in the maze, and twice as fast as the player after all the robots are destroyed.
It was challenge enough managing one's way through, tweaking on soda as robots heckle your attempts (one of the first games to use speech synthesis) without the bouncing orb of doom looming closely behind. He might even be responsible for two teenagers dying of heart attacks while playing the game in the early 80's. Evil Otto would live on in Frenzy, a more involved and tougher version of Berzerk, but lost his invincibility, falling to a third shot to his grinning countenance. My hood goes off to you, oh evil, Evil Otto.
