This Week In Retro: Yars' Revenge (Patreon)

May 1982: Ah, space mosquitos. The perfect avatar for revenge

by Diamond Feit

Long-time readers of my work (hi mom!) might remember an opinion column I wrote back in 2010 about the dwindling number of "high-concept" video games. Originally a free submission for the community-driven website Bitmob, it was reprinted in GamePro magazine, my first ever by-line in a physical publication. For those unable or unwilling to click the link above, the short version is that video games used to be a "high-concept" medium that excelled at communicating all necessary information to players in an instant.

You can see gaming's high-concept roots in all the medium's earliest hits, which often managed to summarize the nature of the game with just the title. If a video game was based on a sport, that game would simply be named for said sport. Yet even original works strove to make their meanings crystal-clear. Pong is a virtual form of ping-pong (or tennis), Space Invaders is about shooting invaders—possibly from space, and while the name Pac-Man doesn't mean anything to an English speaker, its "eat or be eaten" premise is immediately apparent. It made a little more sense in Japan where he was originally known as…nevermind.

This high-concept principle applied to arcade games and home games alike, as there was little philosophical difference between the two in this era. With the entire notion of buying video games being quite new, I'm certain Atari wanted to minimize confusion for kids and their parents regarding what the contents of each release could be. Even without a coin slot on the console, most Atari 2600 games were score-driven challenges with a limited number of tries and no option to continue. Game titles were just as straightforward; I spent many hours playing Combat (two players shoot at each other), Adventure (a proto-Metroidvania), and Superman (starring Superman™).

There were, of course, a lot of Atari 2600 games, so not every single one of them was high-concept. Some were far from it yet still managed to find an audience despite their inscrutable nature. Such was the case 40 years ago this month when Yars' Revenge arrived in stores. The title makes no sense—who the hell is Yar, and why does it want revenge—and the cover art of a giant metal mosquito raises more questions than it answers. This original Atari creation had to share shelf space alongside instantly recognizable arcade ports like Berzerk and Defender, yet it succeeded and changed the life of its young designer, as it was his first-ever video game.

First things first: it is Yars' Revenge, a plural possessive, not Yar's Revenge. There is no "Yar," there are Yars, a race of space bugs evolved from the miniscule variety that we have on Earth. According to Yars' legend, when insects stowed away on early Earth rockets and journeyed to the stars, their vessel crashed on an alien planet and they developed into a sentient species capable of independent interplanetary flight.

The Yars do not live in peace, however. While developing a massive gun (an allegedly defensive weapon) they were attacked by the hostile Qotile who completely destroyed the fourth planet of the Yars' solar system. Now the Yars seek to even the score by using the power of space flight and their unfinished Zorlon Cannon to strike back at the Qotile and "avenge [their] community."

What does all this mean to the player? The game is a showdown between the Yars and the Qotile that takes place on a single screen. Players must wear down the enemy shields by firing energy blasts or flying in to nibble away at the Qotile defenses. Staying mobile is key, as the Qotile use homing missiles that chase the Yars around the screen. When the shields are weak enough, players must line up the Zorlon Cannon with the Qotile from across the screen and hit fire, hoping that the beam connects with its target (and not the Yars, who are just as vulnerable to their own weapons as the Qotile). Hit or miss, the battle rages on until the player runs out of Yars and the game ends; ultimately, Yars' Revenge is a tale of unfulfilled vengeance since the mission can never be completed and Planet IV is lost forever.

If you've ever played or just glanced at an Atari 2600 game, you'd know that this amount of lore is uncommon for the era, considering most players bought games based solely on the name or cover art. None of the backstory laid out above is expressed on screen; the entirety of Yars' Revenge had to fit inside 4 kilobytes of memory, so including even a fraction of the necessary text on the cartridge would have been impossible. However, the graphics are far too surreal and the gameplay makes no sense without implicit guidance, so Atari had to find a way to communicate to players what to do and why it matters.

Since Yars' Revenge had no pre-established pop culture foothold and had to stand on its own four legs, Atari went all-out and created an elaborate world and story to support the action. The company took the added step of packing the game with a comic book that both outlined the entire saga and explained the on-screen imagery. This gave Yars' Revenge more of a narrative than any of its contemporaries, turning the oddball shooter into a memorable tale of tragedy and reciprocity. I never understood why Donkey Kong hated Mario or what made Zaxxon so evil, but Yars' Revenge made its central conflict matter to me.

The creator of Yars' Revenge is Howard Scott Warshaw who was just 23 years old when he joined Atari in 1981. The rookie programmer had never made a video game before receiving his first assignment to port Star Castle to the 2600. Looking at the tools and resources available to him, Warshaw didn't see a way to create a satisfying version of that arcade game at home, so he proposed an original title that borrowed a few concepts but otherwise looked and played completely differently.

In Star Castle, the enemy sits in the center of the screen behind layers of shielding. The player must fly around, Asteroids-style, and shoot their way through the barriers without getting shot themselves. Yars' Revenge necessarily simplifies all of this but also adds more than it subtracts, giving the player more threats to evade (including the fire from their own Zorlon Cannon). Looking it up on YouTube, I can remember seeing Star Castle in arcades and playing it at least once, but Yars' Revenge stuck with me for decades. When I encountered the game for the first time in my adult life back in 2016, I quickly recalled everything I needed to know and found myself playing for a long, long time.

On a console that bet big on licensing and translating hit arcade games for use at home, Yars' Revenge made millions for Atari despite Warshaw's lack of design experience and Yars' complete lack of name recognition. As the man behind the phenomenon, Warshaw says he "had designs for a Yars series" and intended the next game to be a test of skills called "Yarian Olympics." Yet his success carried a price, as his next project turned out to be an adaptation of Raiders of the Lost Ark. Warshaw went from a company newbie to taking meetings with Steven Spielberg. When that game sold well, Spielberg looked to Warshaw again to work on adapting his next film into a video game. The only catch was it had to be ready by year's end, leaving Warshaw with precious little time to complete the project. That game turned out to be E.T. and that is most definitely a story for another day.

Yars' Revenge remains unique 40 years later. So many Atari games became templates for future genres, thanks in part to their high-concept nature. No one needs a tutorial or a pack-in comic to understand a modern descendant of Breakout. Yars' Revenge is different as it doesn't look like anything at first glance, but once players get a grasp of the action, it's satisfying to complete loop after loop.

Where are the Yars today? They never found lasting fame, but they're hardly forgotten either. Yars' Revenge saw a few re-releases over the years, including a version for Facebook that no longer flies, along with a 2011 "reimagining" that ditched the space mosquito aesthetic for a winged humanoid and turned a single-screen experience into an on-rails third-person shooter. None of these later interpretations could top the original, however, which is safely enshrined in the Museum of Modern Art as part of that institution's select collection of video games. While it is not on display as of this writing, it is correctly attributed to Howard Scott Warshaw who is listed as the sole "artist," though it is incorrectly titled as "Yar's Revenge," singular. It would appear the Yars' true enemy was not the Qotile, but bad grammar.

Diamond Feit lives in Osaka, Japan but is forever online, sharing idle thoughts on Twitter and playing games on Twitch.