This weekend my seven-year-old son was playing nonsensical games in the yard with his sisters. Suddenly he yelled 'Intruder Alert! Intruder Alert!" in a mechanical intonation. It was a clear reference to the robots in the classic 1980 arcade game Berzerk, in which the robots would say just that. Evan sounded uncannily like them. (Try the second mpeg on this page.)

He hasn't been in an arcade that had Berzerk. I haven't seen one in the arcade in decades. We don't have a computer version. Absent a single reference in a Simpsons episode about twelve seasons ago, I don't think the robotic "intruder alert! intruder alert!" has been featured in pop culture in living memory.

So where did he pick it up?

Do boys on the playground pass such things on, right down to the mechanical intonation, for an entire generation? Or is the notion of watchful robots coded into our collective unconscious?

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