In the fifth chapter of Racing the Beam, Nick and I discuss Howard Scott Warshaw’s popular Atari game Yars’ Revenge. The game is often called Atari’s most successful original game for the Atari 2600, but in fact it was originally meant to be an adaptation of Star Castle, a then-popular vector-graphics game by Cinematronics. But, because of the very different graphics systems in the XY graphics cabinet versus the Atari VCS, Warshaw decided to make an original game instead, inspired by some of the design elements of Star Castle. Here’s a relevant excerpt from Racing the Beam:
Howard Scott Warshaw’s first 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.” 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 well- suited to home play.
In another chapter of the book, on the much-maligned VCS version of Pac-Man, Nick and I discuss a very recent adaptation of the game that fixed many of the “problems” in Tod Frye’s original. I use scare quotes here because we also explain that VCS Pac-Man wasn’t so much a failure as the product of a very particular moment in time. It’s . The adaptation was done by Nukey Shay, and I’ve embedded a video of it below. You’ll see that the colors, sounds, monster behavior, and other features of the original coin-op are quite faithfully recreated. Of course, Shay had the benefit of twenty years of hindsight, not to mention a lot of innovation in techniques and understanding in the Atari hobbyist community.
A similar thing has taken place for Star Castle. Scott Williamson (who once worked for Atari, as it happens) has been working on a VCS adaptation of the game for some time now. I’ve know about it for a while from reading the AtariAge.com forums, but Scott has just posted a Kickstarter campaign seeking support for manufacturing custom cartridges for its distribution. Check out what Williamson has accomplished in the video below. For those of us who dork out on Atari VCS programming, it’s an impressive feat—even if it did take an 8k ROM to accomplish (4k was the standard in 1982).
In a recent review of my latest Atari game A Slow Year, Nick Lalone said this of the game:
A Slow Year takes the assumptions of modernity and doesn’t try to re-establish them with the technology present now, it tries to ask a question of us all – What would have happened if games like A Slow Year had been created when this type of game was the technological equivalent of Crysis?
Unlike all of the things this game made me think of, A Slow Year isn’t about nostalgia, it is about regret. In the trying times we exist in currently, A Slow Year asks us if we had started down a different path, would we have manged to get to this exact same place?
Even though Williamson’s Star Castle is a very different kind of game than my A Slow Year, but it too poses Lalone’s question, in its own way: what if people had continued to care for the Atari VCS in a way that made us continue to pursue new games for it, including both totally different games that were never imagined in the 1970s and 1980s, and new adaptations of older games using the unique properties of this unusual console? In that regard, I have to admit, I’m quite proud to read in Williamson’s Kickstarter description that he was inspired by Racing the Beam—as was Ed Fries when he created Halo 2600. Williamson, Fries, and the many Atari hobbyists working for nothing other than their own satisfaction demonstrate that a small community has indeed continued to care for the system in this way, as a living medium. But as ever, I hope more and more will start to.