It’s fair to say that Atari, as an entity, has been through the absolute wringer over the years.
With each new iteration of a company branding itself “Atari”, more and more people make jokes about them reanimating a zombie corpse and not really being anything to do with old-school Atari aside from occasionally shitting out a no-frills compilation or two of emulated 2600 games for the current generation of systems.
But in more recent years, under the leadership of CEO Wade Rosen, the company has been making great strides in not only honouring the Atari name’s legacy, but also in pushing it forward in a sensible direction for the future. Yars Rising, a brand new game created in collaboration with Shantae developers WayForward, is an absolutely prime example of that. Let’s take a closer look after the jump.
In Yars Rising, you take control of Emi Kimura, a worker drone for the huge corporation QoTech who does some moonlighting as a hacker. As the game opens, Emi has been tasked with hacking into her employer’s systems on behalf of a mysterious client. Naturally, things don’t quite go according to plan and escalate quite considerably, as the nefarious schemes of QoTech CEO Phillip Ong come to light. Yes, his name is indeed P. Ong and, mild spoiler, I guess, you defeat him exactly how you think you would defeat someone with that name. But I digress.
What then follows is an open-structure exploratory platformer in which Emi must explore the QoTech building and the surrounding environment in Syzygy City, hack into various terminals to acquire new abilities and get to the bottom of what’s going on.
Quite understandably, when Yars Rising was first announced, a lot of old-school Atari fans were confused and even offended at the fact an apparent follow-up to 2600 classic Yars’ Revenge seemed to be a colourful platformer with anime-style art and a youthful protagonist. Regrettably, this means that a number of those same old-school Atari fans wrote the game off before deciding to delve into it further. I say “regrettably” because as well as being a damn fine open-structure exploratory platformer, Yars Rising is a veritable love letter to Atari history.
The most obvious way in which this manifests itself is in the game’s hacking sequences, which are represented as various twists on the classic Yars’ Revenge.
Quick history lesson for those not already familiar with Yars’ Revenge. First released in 1982 and developed by Howard Scott Warshaw, Yars’ Revenge is a popular entry in the Atari 2600 library. It’s a simple but engaging shoot ’em up in which you control the fly-like Yar on a quest to defeat as many Qotile enemies as possible. You achieve this by blasting through a shield made up of cells that protects the Qotile, then summoning a powerful Zorlon Cannon shot to fling at the Qotile and defeat it. As you are attempting to do this, you are pursued by a relentless Destroyer Missile, and the Qotile occasionally unleashes a speedy “Swirl” attack — and you can also shoot yourself up your own arse with the Zorlon Cannon if you’re not careful.
Yars’ Revenge was the first of several Atari games from the period to have a comic book adaptation that was included with every copy. This gave the game a well fleshed-out backstory despite it not really having much relevance to the game itself — and there was also a War of the Worlds-style dramatic musical adaptation of the narrative produced by the Kid Stuff record label in 1983, joining similar adaptations of Asteroids, Missile Command, Pac-Man and Donkey Kong around the same time. Believe it or not, all this is very relevant to Yars Rising, but let’s get back to the point.
In the early game, the Yars’ Revenge-inspired hacking sequences are very simple and straightforward — even more so than the original 2600 game in a couple of cases — but as you progress through the story, you start to be confronted with more and more elaborate challenges, some of which draw inspiration from other 2600 and arcade classics, including Missile Command, Centipede, Black Widow and Space Invaders.
Space Invaders isn’t an Atari game, of course — it’s by Taito — but its 1980 port to Atari 2600 was regarded as the platform’s “killer app” by some, meaning in a game paying homage to Atari history it’s important to acknowledge it somehow. Yars Rising gets around the pesky trademark issue by positioning the invaders as “Silorak”, which I’m sure is a reference to something but I can’t find conclusive proof of it previously existing anywhere else other than Yars Recharged, a more conventional modernisation of the Yars’ Revenge gameplay that Atari put out in 2022.
Anyway, point is, playing Yars’ Revenge and numerous creative twists on it is absolutely core to the Yars Rising experience, and once you’ve unlocked one of these hacking minigames, it can be played at any time completely separately from the main game by accessing the “Emi’s Hacklist” mode.
This even includes some unique missions not found in the main game, including three rather tricky “survival mode” challenges that give you one life to make it through multiple stages based on Yars’ Revenge, its 2005 follow-up Yars’ Return (which began life as a homebrew title but was subsequently folded into official Atari canon) and the additions to the basic formula found in Yars Rising, such as cells which can only be destroyed by shooting, nibbling or blasting with the Zorlon Cannon.
So that’s the most obvious way in which Yars Rising pays homage to classic Atari. But it doesn’t stop there; there are myriad elements of the game which suggest both current-day Atari and WayForward did plenty of research. Like how the protagonist, Emi Kimura, is named after Hiro Kimura, the artist who designed the original box art for Yars’ Revenge. Or how the main setting, Syzygy City, is named after Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney’s company prior to Atari. Or how the save points are all Computer Space machines — which were manufactured by Syzygy. Or how the timer countdown on the Emi’s Hacklist challenges uses the default colour palette from the Atari 8-bit range of home computers. Or how the shots Emi fires from her hand are all expressed in rainbow colours like early ’80s Atari product packaging, and the famous “Colourflow” rainbow stripes effect most Atari hardware from the period loved showing off at every opportunity. You get the idea.
Of particular note is the musical accompaniment to the action. Music is often a strong aspect of WayForward releases, and Yars Rising is no exception to this, with its soundtrack being one of the most ambitious and elaborate affairs the company has ever produced.
Much of it is in the unmistakably modern “synthwave” or “city pop” styles that pay homage to the music of the ’80s with a modern-day twist, with contributing artists including frequent Atari collaborator Megan McDuffee, the Tokyo-based French-Japanese electronic artist Moe Shop, Japanese chiptune artist TORIENA and River City Girls composer Dale North, but there are a number of songs on the complete soundtrack which are very obvious homages to late ’70s disco, which would have been popular around the time of the Atari 2600’s original launch. Think Star Wars and Other Galactic Funk and you’ll have the right sort of vibe.
By far the deepest cut comes towards the game’s finale, in which the song “Fly, Yar Warriors, Fly” from the aforementioned Kid Stuff record is used in instrumental form to punctuate some dramatic sequences, and in an excellent vocal rearrangement by Tommy Pedrini and Jason Zaffary for the end credits.
So hopefully by now we’ve established that Yars Rising is very much true to its Atari roots in numerous ways. But putting in clever references all over the place doesn’t necessarily make a great piece of work. How does the game as a whole hang together?
Very well, as it happens. A while back, I took a look at the Steam Next Fest demo for Yars Rising and came away very impressed with how the game used slick cel-shaded polygonal visuals but made a real effort to ensure it felt like a classic 2D sprite-based platformer, and this is, of course, still true for the full game. One might argue that Yars Rising isn’t doing anything especially ambitious that pushes the exploratory platformer genre forwards — aside from, maybe, the way the Yars’ Revenge sequences are implemented — but honestly, that doesn’t really matter. Yars Rising is simply a really solid, well put together example of this sort of game.
One aspect that is particularly worthy of praise is the in-game map system. This not only automatically tracks where you’ve been as in most other examples of the genre, it also marks exits that you haven’t yet been through and exits that you can’t yet access. Better still, in that latter case it tells you exactly why you can’t access that exit when you select it in the map. This means you can always see at a glance when it might be worth backtracking to some earlier areas, because those red blocked-off exits will have been replaced by the white unexplored exits.
You acquire the various abilities that enable Emi to access those blocked-off exits via hacking the terminals throughout the game. There are a few “major” upgrades over the course of the game that unlock Emi’s abilities to destroy certain obstacles, dash across large gaps, jump off walls, survive underwater and boost herself much higher than a regular leap. Interestingly, that latter option is not implemented as a “double jump” as in most games of this type; it has its own distinct way of handling, which helps set Yars Rising apart from its numerous peers.
Besides these major upgrades, there are also a wide variety of terminals scattered across the game world that provide Emi with boosts to her abilities in various forms. Known as BioHacks, these have to be equipped in order to take effect, and Emi can only equip as many BioHacks as she can fit into the shape of her Yar tattoo. Naturally, the more powerful upgrades take up more “blocks” of the tattoo, so you’ll need to customise Emi according to your preferred play style — or indeed according to the challenges that she’s facing.
The BioHacks cover a wide range of possibilities. On the simple end of things are straight increases to Emi’s health, special ability charges, shot power and shot speed. These are pretty much always useful. More situational are upgrades to her mobility skills, which allow her to, for example, dash further, propel herself further from a wall jump or fly higher with the aforementioned boost jump.
Then there are BioHacks that are specifically designed to make the Yars’ Revenge-style hacking sequences easier. These include rapid fire, triple shots, more powerful shots, the ability to nibble away at barriers more quickly, the opportunity to “cloak” and protect yourself from hazards and many more. Equipping the right BioHacks at the right time is an important part of making it through the game, at least on your first run. Speedrunners and those who enjoy a challenge, meanwhile, may like to note that the optional BioHack upgrades are indeed optional. None are outright required to progress through the main game; for the most part, they just make life a bit easier.
Some might find Yars Rising a little too easy in places. The last couple of bosses, for example, are fairly trivial if you fully equip Emi with her shot power and shot speed upgrades, and the Computer Space save points also fully restore Emi’s health when she uses them, making it pretty rare you’ll get into a situation where you’re in real danger, as these checkpoints are placed quite frequently throughout the game world.
That’s not to say that there’s no challenge at all, mind, though most of the tricky aspects tend to come from traversal challenges rather than combat. There are some relatively devious platforming sequences in the latter half of the game, particularly if you’re after all the upgrades, and while those aforementioned bosses are easy if you know what to do, in several cases you have to actually figure out what to do first and, pleasingly, the game doesn’t treat you like an idiot and tell you exactly what you’re doing wrong after you fail once or twice. (That said, in a concession to those who didn’t misspend their youth playing the original Yars’ Revenge, you can optionally make yourself completely invincible in the hacking sequences, meaning even those with zero 2600 experience should be able to make it through the game’s main story.)
And once you’ve beaten the game there’s more to fiddle around with, too. There’s the aforementioned Emi’s Hacklist, which includes a number of challenges that aren’t in the main game, some of which are very tricky indeed. Then there’s “Pro Mode”, which is another playthrough of the main game at a much harder difficulty. And, of course, on platforms that support such things, there are the obligatory achievements and trophies to chase — and pleasingly, none of these are stupid pointless grindfests, instead simply rewarding you for reaching various milestones in the game, beating it at normal and Pro difficulty, finding all the secrets and clearing Emi’s hacklist.
Yars Rising is exactly the sort of game that Atari should be making. While it’s great that the company’s present incarnation is very much in touch with its history, expressed through products such as the excellent interactive documentary Atari 50, its 2600+, 7800+ and 400 Mini consoles and its official retro ROM cartridge releases, the thing that’s going to keep people interested in Atari as a brand over the long term is new stuff. And Yars Rising represents arguably the absolutely optimal way for them to create new stuff: paying homage to their classic properties while acknowledging and embracing the technology, game design and culture of today.
And while some grumpy old Atari fans may baulk at the idea of a spunky, wisecracking twentysomething heroine presented in colourful, anime-style art running around an open-structure 2D map blasting things with her hand, this grumpy old Atari fan was absolutely delighted with Yars Rising. It’s a fusion of everything I like about gaming, both old and new, and I sincerely hope it’s not the last project of this ilk that we see from Atari and collaborators such as WayForward.
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