Atari 2600 #11: Yars' Revenge

 Atari 2600 #12: Yars’ Revenge

 

Developer: Atari

Publisher: Atari

Release Date: May 1982

 

I gotta read that comic book!

 

Hey, did you know that Howard Scott Warshaw crashed the video game market by making a game so bad that they buried it in a landfill? That’s an extreme oversimplification, but Warshaw has taken his status as the Atari destroyer and used it to become a minor celebrity. I’ll talk about that game later, but today I am looking at his first game and one major hit, Yars’ Revenge. I loved this game in high school when I was rediscovering Atari, and I used to get together with my friends to play it on the weekends. It will always make me think of my late friend Robbie who referred to the missile that chases you as The Rice. I still think of it as The Rice to this day, and it still feels like a tribute to him when I play it. My sentimentality might skew my rating just a bit, but if you’re looking for Atari games that weren’t also iconic arcade games than Yars’ Revenge is a great place to start. It’s also the best-selling original game that Atari made, so there are tons of copies out there. I have copies of all three major label variations. I’m cool like that.

 

Yars’ Revenge is a game that looks complicated, but it has that great Atari simplicity that makes it fun to play. It’s certainly one of the weirdest looking single screen games of all time. It’s got that big stripe in the middle of it that looks like a glitch. There is only ever one enemy on screen, and it is surrounded by a blocky barrier that looks like something out of Breakout. You can shoot the barrier, but you can’t shoot the big enemy on the screen. But don’t worry, this all makes perfect sense. That big glitch is a safe zone where the roving missile aka The Rice can’t harm you. The barrier of course is either shot at or eaten to gain you missile to shoot the enemy with. Occasionally the enemy will dart across the screen, and this is your opening to attack. See, it’s super simple. The game only has one thing to do in it, and in many cases, this can ruin an Atari game, but luckily in Yars’ Revenge this is the biggest strength.

 

What makes the game fun is its unpredictability. There’s not a set time or for when the enemy is going to dart across the screen. It’s much more about reflexes than planning. It’s not a game like
Donkey Kong that you can play basically the same way every time. Although the goal is the same, every reset is a new challenge. It also gets harder as it goes along. The missile moves faster, and the enemy starts to chase you. Eventually the neutral zone disappears, and you have to constantly move if you want to survive. Sadly, this efficiency in gameplay is something Warshaw would soon forget, and his desire to make things more complicated spoiled what could’ve been quite a career.

Don't worry, it's supposed to look like this

 

The Warshaw effect comes back again in the game’s interesting but annoying Easter egg. I can’t say exactly how to trigger it, but if you meet certain conditions you get to see HSWHSW where the score is supposed to be. What’s annoying is that it never goes away, and you have to reset the game. Was it really so important to get your initials in there MR. HSW that you had to break the game? I even got it to pop up while I was playing a perfectly normal game for this blog. It’s no fun getting off to a good start only to have to start all over again. At least he made it only happen early in the game.

It's not a great game for screen shots, however

 Overall, however, Yars’ Revenge is a fun game without any major flaws. It was a commercial and critical success, and one that you have to buy an Atari to play. So many of their games from the boom era were arcade conversions that ended up on every other console and computer around. Yars’ Revenge was isolated to the 2600. This was a good idea, and something Atari didn’t focus on enough.

Warshaw would follow this game up with two movie adaptations, Raiders of the Lost Ark and of course E.T. They are both difficult to play and even more difficult to write about. Coming out of the gate, however, he released a classic. Thank of him as the video game version of The Stone Roses. A brilliant debut and then a quick decline. Right now, Yars’ revenge sits at #36 on the overall list which puts it at the top of the Atari 2600 list. There are some better 2600 games that I will review in the future, but Yars’ Revenge will still be a classic.

Atari 2600 

1. Yars’ Revenge 
2. Adventure 
3. Video Pinball 
4. Fast Eddie 
5. Gopher 
6. Entombed 
7. Red Sea Crossing 
8. Gamma-Attack 
9. Cosmic Commuter 
10. Gyruss 
11. Birthday Mania 

The big list: https://1drv.ms/w/s!AvR1pVOGMfAniEZub_KTCsR7twUv?e=mV6sJ8

images are from mobygames.com