Yar's Revenge remade into an anime-inspired rail shooter

The downloadable Yars' Revenge reboot spotted in Atari's earnings report has been officially revealed. Yar's Revenge (even the apostrophe placement has been rebooted!) is an anime-style game following one rogue Yar (an insectoid creature) fighting the evil Qotile forces that had previously brainwashed her.

Speaking to Big Download, producer Michael Fahrny said Yar's Revenge "is now a third-person arcade shooter experience in which a Yar flies through visually stunning Miyazaki-inspired landscapes while fighting a wide variety of memorable enemies." Basically, you'd have no idea it was supposed to be a remake of the 1981Yars' Revenge if it wasn't for the game title. Landscapes? Variety? Miyazaki-inspired? Quite a step from that psychedelic "neutral zone" and the single Qotile laser cannon behind a shield found in the Atari 2600 game. "If you like games like Panzer Dragoon or Star Fox," Fahrny said, "then Yar's Revenge is right up your alley."

This new Yar's is the work of Killspace Entertainment, a studio formed by EALA, Obsidian, Red 5 and Pandemic vets. Check out a trailer after the break, and try to remember, it's for Yar's Revenge.

Reader Comments (29)

Oh god, I remember having this on Game Boy when I was five. And I laughed at how bad it was then. This looks kinda cool though.

@Esposch I had this game when I was six for the Atari 2600, and it was one of my favorite games on the system. Kids these days...

Hey, get off my lawn.

The game you had was a remake of the original.

The original game was one of the best on the Atari 2600.

...Wow, this trailer has absolutely nothing to go on.

When you go making promises of Panzer Dragoon-style gameplay and Miyazaki-inspired levels, I'm almost expecting to be disappointed.

@Freakservo I know how you feel. Heard over from another site that it was Zone of Enders esque. In other words no one knows what they are talking about and are just making random assumptions from small tidbits of info.

I hate when game developers (and movie producers) take a classic game (or movie) and warp it beyond all recognition, but then keep the title so that people who liked the original will buy it not knowing it has about as much in common with the original as Final Fantasy 14 has with the first Final Fantasy.
Also, why does Yar look like Lady Gaga?

@Cdy2007
Yar wasn't a single being. Yar's revenge was about the Yars rebelling (I think rebelling...) against the Qotile. Ostensibly, each life is a different Yar undertaking the monumental task of firing a Zorlon cannon to defeat Swirls and expel the Qotile. The player's failure means the continued enslavement of the Yars to construct more rockets to destroy the world of Saboteurs.

@s1l3n70n3 Ok, but what's your point? I'm sorry I don't know the deep and intricate backstory behind an Atari game.

@Cdy2007

You missed an era... hell. I have a basic dungeon crawler on 3.5" floppies (bragging, at the time, about being on 3.5" floppies just like CD-ROM games used to) that included a 200 page history of the world the game took place in.

I miss that era of gaming. I miss when Starcraft had a manual that detailed how some alien race created the Protoss but moved on to create the Zerg and the Zerg destroyed that alien race....

@SheppyReturns I was born in '92 so I wasn't really around for that. Plus, I had an NES. I guess I just find it hard to take that kind of detailed backstory seriously when your character is a pixel lol. But I do know what you mean, when I play a great game with a really deep story, I want to learn more about it.

@s1l3n70n3

Are you effin' kidding me? I had yars revenge on the atari when I was a kid, but I just kinda thought it was about being in a rocket ship and blowin' up a shield before shooting a bigass cannon.

I can't believe that 1) there was a story, and 2) someone knows it.

Yars are a race of flies subjected to build missiles. Those do not look like flies. THIS IS NOT CANON!

All I care about is the original.

If the remake happens to be good, then that's great, but I'm keeping my expectations very, very low.

Great, they Bionic Commando'd it

Hopefully, my wish for a Golgo-13 Top Secret Episode remake is not far behind

http://ingenre.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/yars_revenge_full.jpg

Yeah... no. Quit messing up my games with your remedial art class designs. If anything, the remake should be more like EDF2017 and not this awful crap.

At first I read this as Yaris Revenge.
That would be horrible, I regret playing that game

@Jawmuncher I actually opened this article specifically to see if anyone else had said that because that's exactly what I read at first too...

I cringed.

Old games like this should get the Pacman CE DX treatment instead.

Yar was a girl? Kind of hard to tell from the pixels, I guess.

@Gaddes Didn't get that impression from the comic packed with the game, either. Forget this Miyazaki business... let's have a video game that looks like the Yar's Revenge comic.

Well, I haven't played the game and already I'm disappointed... What's with gaming companies ruining franchises/games I like recently? Devil May Cry, Goldeneye, Castlevania, Bionic Commando, probably a few more I'm missing, and now this... They're even screwing up the title, this is just stupid.

I'm really starting to be annoyed at modern gaming... Hopefully Splatterhouse doesn't suck too....

I like how the faceless, genderless Yar from the original game now has boobs. Because it's female.

And that face is terrible. I sincerely hope it's just the lighting, because it being a lighter color than the body isn't making it look any better.

@Drakkenfyre Hey man, nothing's sexier than fly boobs.

Wow, her eyes are REALLY high! Freaked me out...

If anyone wonders why us old timers get cranky over remakes, it is because of crap like this.

To help you understand, here is the comic that came with the original Atari 2600 game:

http://www.atariage.com/comics/comic_thumbs.html?MagazineID=48

Now look at this trailer again. One of these things is not like the other...

Maybe the unwashed masses really do like the "my first walk cycle test animation.mov" on display here, but I really think any sense of the exotic and imaginative sci-fi setting that the comic provided our early imagination to help fill in the gaps that the screen resolution was unable to has been completely crapped on.

Maybe not completely. I mean, the other creatures in the video look vaguely bug-like. And then, for almost no reason at all, some freakshow-faced human female is there...wanting revenge.

I should wait for a gameplay trailer, but I'm just too old and cranky I guess.

Um, why did I just have to watch two Pantene commercials that were just as long as the trailer? Moreover, why they hell is any company wasting bandwidth showing brand-name hair care ads on a gaming website? Talk about demographic fail. *facepalm*

I am increasingly of the opinion that games become "anime-inspired" when they lack unique and interesting gameplay that will stand on its own. Don't get me wrong, I'm not bashing anime, per se. I simply think that stylistically, it's become a huge Western cliche, kind of like how most Hollywood action heroes since "The Matrix" seem to be Kung Fu virtuosos.

Turning an action classic into a rails-shooter is a bold decision. To then populate it with impossibly large-eyed girls with pink hair... well, let's just say I'm glad that I'm not producing this remake. Talk about risk...

Yars' Revenge

Yar's Revenge remade into an anime-inspired rail shooter

Reader Comments (29)

Posted: Nov 16th 2010 10:03PM Esposch said

Posted: Nov 17th 2010 12:11AM johnperkins21 said

Posted: Nov 17th 2010 12:27AM Drakkenfyre said

Posted: Nov 17th 2010 12:28AM Drakkenfyre said

Posted: Nov 16th 2010 10:08PM Freakservo said

Posted: Nov 17th 2010 12:50PM Robborboy said

Posted: Nov 16th 2010 10:15PM Cdy2007 said

Posted: Nov 16th 2010 10:23PM s1l3n70n3 said

Posted: Nov 16th 2010 10:46PM Cdy2007 said

Posted: Nov 17th 2010 12:02AM SheppyReturns said

Posted: Nov 17th 2010 12:32AM Cdy2007 said

Posted: Nov 17th 2010 9:00PM JCDoe said

Posted: Nov 16th 2010 10:15PM s1l3n70n3 said

Posted: Nov 16th 2010 10:16PM kentuckyfried said

Posted: Nov 16th 2010 10:19PM andrewpoe said

Posted: Nov 16th 2010 10:36PM Cleric said

Posted: Nov 16th 2010 10:51PM Jawmuncher said

Posted: Nov 17th 2010 10:01AM Mcmax3000 said

Posted: Nov 16th 2010 11:42PM Jovrick said

Posted: Nov 16th 2010 11:44PM Jovrick said

Posted: Nov 16th 2010 11:55PM Gaddes said

Posted: Nov 17th 2010 1:28AM MNeko said

Posted: Nov 16th 2010 11:55PM jobocan said

Posted: Nov 17th 2010 12:22AM Drakkenfyre said

Posted: Nov 17th 2010 1:19AM MNeko said

Posted: Nov 17th 2010 1:43AM Shockwave said

Posted: Nov 17th 2010 9:19AM Gimbal said

Posted: Nov 17th 2010 11:00AM Hellion4242 said

Posted: Nov 17th 2010 12:44PM Flakk said

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