‘Yars Rising’ Reinvents Atari’s Forgotten Hit

At the dawn of video gaming in the early Seventies, there was one name that dominated the scene: Atari. For years, the house that Pong built was synonymous with the arcade scene and home consoles, but like many of the biggest players from the old days not named Nintendo, the Atari of today is mostly just a memory. But for all the rosy recollection of games like Space Invaders (1980) and Pac-Man (1982), the biggest first-party title for the company — as in not licensed from an existing arcade hit — is one you may not even know. That’s 1982’s Yars Revenge.

Designed by Howard Scott Warshaw, who famously made Atari’s adaptations of Raiders of the Lost Ark (good!) and E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (bad!), Yars Revenge was one of the flagship titles of the Atari 2600 and resembled a twisted take on Space Invaders, although with less cultural clout garnered throughout the years. Players now are more likely to have heard about the game from their parents than ever having touched it themselves.

That’s what the new Yars Rising (out Sept. 10) aims to fix. Packaged as a sleek, anime-inspired shooter, Rising is a reimagining that plays almost nothing like the original, until it does. Although it looks like a cartoony take on the Metroidvania genre, complete with 2D exploration, labyrinthian level design, and tons of abilities to unlock, it’s secretly just a Trojan horse to get the kids to play Yars Revenge in a surprisingly clever way.

Developed by WayForward, the studio known for the Shontae series as well as retro revivals River City Girls (2019) and Contra: Operation Galuga (2024), Yars Rising takes the basic premise of the 1982 alien shooter as inspiration for a modern 2D platformer. Like in Revenge, the story’s backdrop is an interstellar war between the insectoid race Yars and their evil enemies the Qotile, but here it’s more earthbound, centering on a young hacker named Emi Kimura who’s hired to expose the dark workings of the shady QoTech corporation.

Limited by the tech of the time, Yars Revenge didn’t have much of an in-game narrative, instead launched alongside an accompanying comic book that provided context for the shoot ‘em up game. Drawing inspiration from there, Rising’s narrative unfolds in graphic novel-styled slides (and has its own published series to boot), as well as fully voiced dialogue scenes that break things up. Emi is a charmingly affable lead who routinely speaks to her hacker cohorts via transmitter, in addition to just quipping to herself, in ways that poke fun at the circumstances around them and fill the void in what would otherwise be a pretty lonely exploration of the hallways and catacombs of an industrial complex.

For plot reasons, Emi becomes empowered by the Yars, which kicks off the gameplay in earnest. Her abilities include blasting lasers from her hand, “nibbling” away at energy barriers, and dodging and dashing through the air. Each of her powers is designed to evoke the abilities of the original Yars character from the ’82 game, translating the retro shooter gameplay into something more familiar with audiences who grew up with 2D platformers like Metroid and Hollow Knight.

And look, it all works fine. The standard attacks and movement are adequate, although nothing revolutionary. The stealth areas are extremely basic, requiring little thought to solve. The exploration and endless backtracking run par for the course for this type of game. With a tongue-in-cheek tone and colorful aesthetic, Yars Rising has a pleasant vibe that does a lot of heavy lifting for the areas where the moment-to-moment action is just good enough. In some ways, it feels like the lack of over-design is a choice, with the feel of controlling a character without much inertia in their action. On its own, Rising doesn’t really hold a candle to its genre peers, but the truth is that it’s mostly just a framing device for a second game nested within the first, and that one is much more interesting.

At frequent intervals, Emi will need to conduct a hack to open a security door or unlock a new move, and this is where the Trojan horsing of the original Yars Revenge becomes clear. Accessing a terminal drops players into a modernized update of the original game for quick hits of pixelated play. Like an extended tutorial, the base game functions almost like a series of connecting dots between terminals, with new abilities unlocked paralleling the challenges seen in the mini-games, which get extremely difficult over time.

While the 2D platformer part of Yars Rising is a cute, if slight, adventure game, the slices of retro action can be entertaining in ways where they feel like this is the actual point. On normal mode, Rising is a breezy experience, almost lulling users into complacency until the hacking sequences kick them in the ass. The disparity between the two modes can be jarring, with the bulk of the game being simple to the point of boredom; even the in-game map holds your hand with clear way points to follow. It’s at times too easy for hardcore players, then suddenly too difficult for casual ones.

Beating the game unlocks Pro mode — a much more challenging version of the base game that doesn’t change its core mechanics but removes all of the modern guardrails like the constant reminders of where terminals and directives are, and upping enemy attack damage to a frustrating degree, making for a Yars Rising that hues much closer to the unforgiving nature of older games. Here, the higher skill ceiling better marries the two very different concepts that’re otherwise at odds. After being pummeled into submission time and again en route to a terminal, it’s almost a relief to break things up with a little pixel-perfect arcade break. But one wrong move will set you very far back — sometimes upward of 20 minutes to the latest checkpoint.

It’s hard to say who Yars Rising is designed for. It’s two totally different experiences woven together into a massive meta-game. For fans of modern Metroidvania type games, it’s solid enough with charisma to spare, but that may not be enough. Although many of the most difficult retro sections are optional, there’s still many more that are required to progress. It’s like someone remaking Pac-Man as a prettier new thing but pumping the brakes for you play the original game every few minutes anyway. The hat-on-a-hat premise of Yars Rising feels clever for the most part, but by the time the credits roll, there’s a sense that it could’ve been better as one thing or the other.

As a reintroduction to a long forgotten game, Yars Rising is effectively outside the box and would be a great foundation for a sequel that leans further into crafting its own identity. But stuck in this form, Yars Rising mostly amounts to a lot of glittery packaging around a gift that’s really for your dad. Perhaps, it’s a lesson about gaming used to look like, but there could be a little more about what it could be.