This is it! The final game in Atari Flashback Classics — and it just happens to be one of the most legendary games for the Atari 2600. It’s Howard Scott Warshaw’s all-time classic Yars’ Revenge!
This was one of the all-time best-selling games for the Atari 2600, and with good reason: it was original, it was enjoyable, it was fun and interesting to play. No, it might not look like much today — and indeed looked a bit like something was going horribly wrong with your console even back when it was current — but it’s got that special fun factor where it counts.
For the various Atari Flashback consoles over the years, Atari included a number of “hacks” of its classic games that were decent enough to be considered full sequels.
One such example is Yars’ Return, a follow-up to Howard Scott Warshaw’s classic Yars’ Revenge. This first appeared on an Atari Flashback console in 2005 and has continued to be distributed on Flashback consoles and in compilations like Atari Flashback Classics — complete with a bug that developer Dennis Debro fixed about a decade ago — ever since. You can even buy a cart copy from Atari’s “Atari XP” initiative now, too.
Classic Atari 2600 game Yars’ Revenge never got an official conversion to Atari 8-bit, sadly.
That doesn’t mean people haven’t done their best to make their own, however! Today we have one such example, where a brave AtariAge denizen decided to take on the challenge of programming their own original take on Yars’ Revenge, entirely from scratch and, in true 2600 tradition, squeezed into just 4K.
Yars’ Revenge is, it’s fair to say, one of the most well-known and respected Atari 2600 games out there.
Indeed, back in the day it was one of the platform’s best-selling games, being one of several examples from the 1981-1982 period that actually broke a million copies sold. This was, as you might imagine, a pretty big deal back in the early days of video gaming.
It’s enjoyed enduring popularity over the years for good reason. So with it being part of the Atari Collection 2cartridge for the Evercade retro gaming system, let’s take a closer look at what it’s all about.
