Yar’s Revenge

The early days of arcade and home video games were filled with odd and sometimes abstract premises. I mean, Pac- Man was a disembodied head with a mouth like a missing pie wedge, and he gobbled pellets and power pills in a maze populated with multicolored ghosts, for crying out loud!

But those old games could draw players into their crudely pixelated worlds with flickering ease! Was it the simplicity of the graphics themselves that played on the imagination, letting players fill in the rest of the story on their own? Who knows. But there was something about those early games that set the stage for today’s addiction to Playstations and Nintendo 64s.

Yars’ Revenge was one of the first greats. Before Sonic the Hedgehog, Mario and Crash Bandicoot, kids were going crazy for a little space fly named Yar. Nearly everyone who owned an Atari 2600 console has at one time played the game. Coded by Howard Scott Warshaw, and released by Atari in 1982, Yars’ Revenge was an instant hit.

The premise of the game is simple: you’re a Yar, a genetically mutated housefly that can travel safely through space, consume matter and change it into energy, and shoot fireballs from your mouth. The baddie is the Qotile base, which you have to destroy. The base is protected by a Shield and has two weapons: a slow-moving but untiring Destroyer Missile that will follow Yar wherever it goes; and a deadly Swirl that it can launch every few seconds. You’ve got to destroy the Shield to expose the evil Qotile, then quickly dispatch your foe with the Zorlon Cannon.

Now, I’m sure most of these spacey names and concepts were drummed up after the last bit of code was written by Howard Scott Warshaw: Come on, the cartridge even came with a mini comic book (illustrated by sci-fi comic great Frank Cirocco ), that laid out the whole Yar backstory just to whet the imagination. The thing is, the game was so fun, they could have just called it ‘Space Fly’ and packaged it in a plain brown wrapper and I still would have loved it! I’m not sure how many hours I logged, Atari 2600 joystick in hand, destroying the evil Qotile again and again in a cold and calculating fashion. But the hours must have racked up, because one fine day in 1982 I expertly rolled the score of Yars’ Revenge over the top and back to zero. What a thrill! Well, a thrill for a thirteen-year-old sun-starved Atari junkie whose ears perked up when they heard the jingle “Have you played Atari today?”

These days, those of us nostalgic for the old 2600 can readily find consoles and treasure troves of cartridges at garage sales, flea markets and, most certainly, at on-line auction houses like e-bay. (A recent e-bay search for ‘Atari 2600′ brought up over a thousand items!) But for a more immediate fix, check out Stella, the Atari 2600 emulator that runs on nearly every modern software platform. You’ll easily find cartridge ROM files to try out, though technically, if you don’t actually own the cart, it’s piracy to use the ROM file.

For the ultimate quick-fix, surf on over to Yars’ Revenge II, a shockwave fan-made sequel to the classic.

So when that plate of buttery mashed potatoes or homemade macaroni and cheese isn’t quite the comfort food you’re looking for, warm your heart with a trip back to 1982 with Yars’ Revenge. Don’t let the Qotile beat you down!