Racing the Beam : the Atari Video Computer System - Index of

A Yar Is Born
Howard Scott Warshaw’s fi rst assignment at Atari was the project that
would eventually result in Yars’ Revenge. Initially, he was to port the arcade
game Star Castle, produced by Cinematronics, to the Atari VCS. As he told
an interviewer, “I soon realized that a decent version couldn’t be done, so
I took what I thought were the top logical and geometric components of
Star Castle and reorganized them in a way that would better suit the
machine.” 1 Warshaw’s comment reveals how the platform participates in
the ecology of game development. The design of Yars’ Revenge was not
entirely determined by the Atari VCS or dropped on the platform by its
programmer with no concern for how the system worked. The original
idea was to imitate another game, but the capabilities and limitations of
the VCS led the developer to create something different: a reorganization
of Star Castle’s major components that recognized the differences between
vector and raster graphics, exploited the abilities of the TIA, and was wellsuited
to home play.
Warshaw explained in another interview how radical it was for Atari
to drop Star Castle, which it had already arranged to license:
[82]
I did something no one else had ever done, I went to my boss and said
that I had an idea for an original game that would use the same basic
play principles of Star Castle but was designed to fi t the VCS hardware
so it wouldn’t suck. And to their credit, they let me go with it. Think
about that. They blew off a license to let me pursue an original concept
with the promise of making a better game for the system. That would
never happen today. 2
An arcade game that was a hit would of course have a following already,
one that might generate enthusiasm and an initial market. Even in the
early days, when the arcade hits were Pong and Tank rather than Pac-
Man, an arcade game’s fan following could be important when it came
to the home console market. Seen in this way, the licensed arcade game
was not very different from a book or movie, which could also supply a
video or computer game with valuable recognition and a ready market
of fans.
Even if an arcade game hadn’t been a huge success, as was the case
with Star Castle, it would often be ported. A deployed arcade game contained
a complete and fully implemented game design, one that had
been tested on the playing (and paying) public. Ironically, however, the
hardware capabilities of an arcade machine—in terms of processing