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.
