page_title: Yars' Revenge
section_title: Development
hierarchical_section_title: Yars' Revenge / Development
caption_attribution_description: English: Classic Game Postmortem: Yars' Revenge Howard Scott Warshaw &#x7c; Licensed Psychotherapist/ Video Game Pioneer, Independent Location: Room 135, North Hall Date: Thursday, March 5 Time: 11:30am - 12:30pm
context_page_description: Yars' Revenge is a video game released for the Atari 2600 in 1982. It was created by Howard Scott Warshaw and is Atari's best-selling original title for the 2600.
context_section_description: The game began as a licensed port of the Cinematronics arcade game Star Castle. Warshaw's original design for the Atari 2600 conversion was nearly identical to Star Castle: a powerful cannon is protected by three layers of counter-rotating shields. The player must shoot holes in these shields in order to destroy the cannon inside. But once these holes are made, the cannon can also shoot out at the player. If the outermost layer is completely destroyed, new layers of shields are grown. Harassing the player are three free-roaming mines that hunt the player's ship.
  However, as Warshaw realized the 2600's limitations would not allow for an accurate port of the game, he readapted the concept into a new game, preserving the "top logical and geometric components of Star Castle and reorganized them in a way that would better suit the machine". The reimagined game's working title was Time Freeze, because Warshaw wanted an action game where time would pause to feature the first full-screen explosion in a video game.
  The final game story involves mutated houseflies defending their world against an alien attacker.  Warshaw "liked secret messages and hidden ideas" and thus inverted the name of Ray Kassar, then CEO of Atari, to become the titular Yar race and its planet Razak. This secret was hinted at by the forward-backward letters in the Easter egg.  Warshaw wanted to call the game Yars' Revenge and so lied to one marketing employee that the CEO had approved the name. He then swore that employee to secrecy, assuming "This guy is going to run back and tell everyone."
  Play testing by Atari found that the game was popular with women, in contrast to most space shooter games, which were not.
caption: Warshaw presenting an analysis of the game's development at GDC 2015
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