What?

Bezerk was an online entertainment network created by Berkeley Systems, the creators of the After Dark screensavers and the original publisher of the early YOU DON'T KNOW JACK games. It originally was created in late 1996 to host one game (that game being YDKJ the netshow), but it soon grew in size, and was given the name Bezerk! In late 1998, Bezerk was moved over to Sierra's WON.net service, and in 2001, all of the Bezerk games, besides Acrophobia, were discontinued. Bezerk Revived is a project that started in late 2022 by SecondSight with the end goal of reviving all five of the Bezerk games.

Why?

SecondSight speaking here - I started this project when I found out about Bezerk and it's games. I've always had a sort of weird interest in old dead internet services like this, particularly because most of them were already dead by the time I was born. It's a good look into an era of the internet that I completely missed out on. This project exists to give people (like me) a chance to experience these games, and to give people who did play them back then a chance to relive their memories playing them.

How?

The answer to that depends which game you're talking about. Be aware - I'm going to get a bit technical here. YDKJ the netshow and YDKJ Sports the netshow doesn't have any online multiplayer, so it was just a matter of recreating the web server used to download the SRF files. There are also a couple of CGI files, but luckily the place where the netshow files were found at had the responses saved for them! The rest of the games use a web server for file updates and an IRC server for the actual game play. The IRC server has a bot in a specific channel that sends "commands" to track scores, switch the round that's playing, and so on.