When the Atari 2600 first released in 1979, games hadn’t reached today’s graphic level, where everything can look somewhere between cartoons and actual people. Bits were a luxury, but they were still fun. However, they didn’t have much of a story to them. The idea of video games as a form of storytelling was still a long ways off, and that even started as a text based game on the computer. Nowadays we have polygons and 3D and 2D drawings out of the 1940s and everything else. We also have stories told within the game itself as you take the role of the hero and follow his life. Saving the princess is a lot harder and more rewarding than simply completing the game.
That’s not to say we haven’t made stories using the plot of a game. Video game “stories” in 1982 were limited to telling you what the goal was. Everything had to be filled in yourself or through existing storytelling media. We ended up getting shows based on video games, and in previous installments of Free Comic Inside we’ve seen comics based on video games either directly, like the Swordquest comics, or indirectly, like Atari Force. Tonight we look at Yars’ Revenge, released for the Atari 2600. So how does one turn this…
…into a full story? Even the manual doesn’t tell you who or what a Yar is or what they want revenge for. It just says you play one, here’s the target, these are the weapons and enemies, now go. If you were one of those kids who didn’t read the manual, you still had no idea which if anything on the screen a Yar was or why they wanted revenge or if that was a good thing or not. I never had the 2600, but cousins did. I didn’t know it came with a comic, Yars’ Revenge: The Qotile Ultimatum! Produced by Atari themselves rather than DC Comics despite still being a Warner property at the time, we have a story…but is it any good? Was I better off NOT knowing?
It’s just the box art. Not sure how I feel about that.
Yars’ Revenge: The Qotile Ultimatum!
Atari (1982)
CARTRIDGE PROGRAMMER: Howard Scott Warshaw
WRITER: Hope Shafer
ARTISTS: Frank Cirocco, Ray Grant, & Hiro Kimura
ART DIRECTIOR: Steve Hendericks
Warshaw is the only notable name here, responsible for so many of Atari’s well received games. Then he was forced to get the famed ET game out in so little time that the end result was a mess. My old Reviewers Unknown colleague Test Zero made a video “defending” the game, but you won’t find many people behind him. It was confusing but I didn’t think it was close to the worst game out for the 2600 at the time. He became a writer after that. However, this game had a lot of praise, and now we can find out what the heck was going on.
We’re almost immediately given a lore dump as a new military recruit is told the entire history of the planet. Apparently passing history class wasn’t a requirement. The Yars are descendants of common Earth flies who ended up on Earth’s first interstellar ship, which immediately crashed on a planet in the Razak system, almost immediately mutating into fly people and taking over two neighboring planets as well. Yars also got superpowers, able to fly through space and turn anything they eat (and they can eat anything) into energy projectiles. I realize they’re trying to explain the game mechanics, but that’s still a rather odd power set from mutation. The Yars on the box doesn’t even look bipedal, but they are in the comics. I thought it was some kind of ship, not a mutant housefly wearing battle armor that gives them a less humanoid appearance. That’s…actually disappointing, and longtime readers know I love my armored heroes.
They still made a giant cannon, the Zorlon Cannon (cool name if you’re an 80s kid), to protect themselves from the enemy they seemingly picked up at random, the Qotile. They blew up planet IV, now a “neutral zone” that absorbs a Yars’ energy attack (and for the story also zirches communications), while the Qotile hide on their planet behind an energy shield. On the plus side, the enemy’s “destroyer missiles” can’t penetrate the shield but their Swirls (that buzzsaw thing that occasionally pops out and comes back and apparently has a weaker name than Zorlon Cannon) can still get past and kill your player character.
The recruit is told once it breaks down the shield he has to help aim the cannon at the enemy base, told how to do it, and then sent off. So our hero flies (no pun intended) off and…that’s it? That’s really the whole story? That’s not a story, it’s an illustrated version of the manual! It falls short of telling the recruit to move a joystick and hit the red button in the corner. What the hell? Every other Atari 2600 comic we looked at tried to tell a complete story set in the universe of the game (or multiverse in Atari Force‘s case). This is just the instruction booklet in comic form when the game already comes with an instruction booklet. Points for giving us backstory, lame as the presentation and the story itself are, but there’s no story here. I waited all these years, and we just get a huge letdown. The art is okay, but nothing spectacular. This wasn’t a DC co-production so I’m not that surprised.
Plus this is the last of the Atari 2600 comics up at Atari Age, and presumably the last comic that came with an Atari game, so we’re ending this group of minicomics on a real low note. I feel ripped off and I didn’t even spend money on this. As for what’s in our next, hopefully larger, installment? I don’t know. In the rotation we have more of the DC minicomics that came with Cinnamon Mini-Buns cereal and the Legions Of Power toyline, but I’ve had trouble finding those in the past. If that continues and we have no new entries, it’ll be back to Eternia. Hopefully it will be more satisfying than this.
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