Wayforward is making another 2D platformer starring a young female protagonist. As news goes this is the equivalent to "today is Thursday." It doesn't happen every day, but it happens quite a lot. What's semi notable about this particular 2D platformer from the company that seems to churn them out as frequently as Nintendo churns out takedown notices for emulators is that it's based in the "Yars" series.

What is the "Yars" series you might ask if you're not in your mid 40s or later? It's a "series" of video games that started with a legitimate classic of the 2600, Yars' Revenge. Yars' Revenge is a 1982 shooter game that's important mostly because it was a high watermark for mechanical complexity and innovation in a console video game at the time. Most 2600 games were incredibly simple affairs where you did one or maybe two things in a pretty straightforward manner, like driving around and shooting in a tank or...playing blackjack. By the 80s even as the 2600 aged things were getting more complex and we saw a bunch of games that pushed design forward with more complex ideas. Games like Pitfall! or Adventure (from 1979) where the player was given more to do and more depth to the action.

Yars' Revenge was part of this wave of later software. At its heart it's a shooter but it's a very weird one, where you chip away at a wall of blocks to expose the enemy's core and then use a separate weapon with time limited shots to actually destroy it. There's also a couple floating pixels to avoid and a neutral zone where you can't hurt or be hurt. It's very interesting and innovative and it works well, with later levels having variations to keep things fresh, but it's so weird it was a big of an evolutionary dead end for the genre, more influential in the way it showed that games could be very outside the box and still work than in having any direct imitators. It also had a bit of an inside baseball appeal, with the name "Yar" being a reversal of "Ray," a former Atari employee, and Howard Scott Warshaw hiding his initials in the game if you performed just the right series of actions.

Yars' Revenge was also notable for its story, which is total early 80s sci-fi gibberish about alien species and unexplained concepts and entities. It was enough to give a little context to the game, and quite good by the standards of early 80s video game stories, but there was no deep lore there and it was more cool in how it set this tone of a truly alien conflict than presenting any kind of coherent story.

Like most early 80s games not named Pac-Man or Donkey Kong Yars' Revenge didn't really develop much of an IP presence. I think there might have been some comic books and there was a sequel released many, many, years later but it's not like Yars' Revenge was a presence on later platforms like the NES or even the ill-fated Atari 7800. Older gamers may have had some nostalgia for the game, but it wasn't even on the level of something like Centipede or Missile Command, which would get halfhearted low budget revivals from time to time. Eventually there was a very weird Panzer Dragoon style game that came out in 2011 for...some reason and it did make its way into Atari's "Recharged" lineup of reimagined early 80s games for modern platforms.

The Recharged title makes a lot of sense because of what that series is and how it actually tries to iterate on and evolve the concepts from the 2600 game, but the other releases in the Yars series just seem...completely random. The 2011 game isn't terrible (I've played it) and does have some semi-interesting attempts to incorporate elements from a very early single screen shooter into a polygonal rail shooter game, but it totally reimagines the Yars from their original concept as evolved Earth house flies who got into space aboard a human ship into a race of humanoid creatures with wings. It mostly just used the "Yars" concept as window dressing for a totally different game.

And now it seems like that's happening again. Now apparently Yars creator Howard Scott Warshaw is consulting on the new game, so he presumably approves of it, but did we really need a 2D platformer "based" on this ancient 2600 game? It's another repurposing of some of the words and concepts into something entirely different.

I'm not offended by the existence of this game, I'm more perplexed by it. Who is it for? You can say "Hey, you're talking about it, so it did its job," but this is a Wayforward game and I pay attention to basically everything they do. They're the Shantae and River City Girls team. They just made a Contra game. They're not exactly an obscure developer that desperately needs to cash in on some ancient nostalgia.

It's also possible that someone at Wayforward is just a fan of the old game and wanted to work with Howard Scott Warshaw, a true gaming pioneer, but there I'd say...why a platformer? When Housemarque wanted to work with Eugene Jarvis they made a twin stick shooter, and Nex Machina is a hell of a game. It really shows how Robotron might have evolved over time. Yars Rising might be great too (it's a platformer from Wayforward so it's at least going to be competent) but it won't show how Yars Revenge might have evolved. We already got the Recharged game for that.

I don't really know why I wrote all this up except that I just think it's strange and maybe a little sad that this thing exists. This constant recycling of IP with vague ties to something older that some people might remember or a name you might have heard feels like it stifles creativity and innovation. Granted Yars Rising hardly seems wedded to the old concepts (the protagonist is decidedly not an evolved house fly) and if Warshaw and Wayforward really wanted to make this...fine, if it's good I may play it and I wish them the best, but what's wrong with new stuff? The gaming scene is just full of these ancient franchises. The biggest platformer is Mario. The biggest fighting games are Street Fighter, Tekken and Mortal Kombat. Fortnite is newish (kind of) but a lot of its appeal is pulling in old IP. It's just our childhoods being remixed and sold to us over and over, except in the case of Yars' Revenge most of us weren't even cognizant when it was actually released.

Jeff Gerstmann recently has been talking about how Call of Duty added Cheech and Chong and how HE'S too young for Cheech and Chong, and he's firmly entrenched in middle age. There was also a Ninja Turtles game revealed in the indie Direct yesterday.

I've been playing Dave the Diver and that game is pretty good, but has some issues. However none of those issues are that it doesn't call back to some property from the 1980s for a hit of nostalgia. There's nothing wrong with presenting something wholly new. The Yars have had their revenge. Do they really need to rise, too, 40 years later?

I agree it's a weird thing,but I do have a theory. After a long dark period of swings that mostly missed, Atari has finally had some success with a few classic compilations and the Recharged games. They are however, running out of things to recharge, and probably figure they need to start doing new stuff with their IPs to keep momentum going. Wayforward has has resurrected several old franchises, and my guess is Atari reached out to them because of it. My guess is Wayforward chose Yars mostly because it's one of the few old Atari games with some actual lore to work with (thin as that lore might be).

@judaspete: It's certainly a plausible scenario.

Atari has been making some interesting moves recently, like buying Digital Eclipse and putting out a 2600 emulation console. They've put out some software that makes sense (like yet ANOTHER take on Haunted House) and some that makes no sense at all (an apparently mediocre original IP called Days of Doom that seems completely outside their niche) so at least something related to the Yars series makes some sense from them.

But it's also not really using that series' lore (at least upon initial inspection) and why is this a 2D platformer of all genres?

"We want to revive the Yars series because we love those games."

"You want to make a shoot 'em up about a space fly but in the modern style?"

"No, we want to make a platformer about a hacker girl. You know. A Yars game!"

In an indie landscape where thousands of games release each year, you need to stand out somehow. By attaching an known ip to your game, you stand out a little but more from the crowd. At least that's how I see it.

@tp0p: I think this is certainly true if you're just a random dev team, but Atari has a lot of IP and Wayforward is a pretty big company that puts out a lot of games and touches a lot of big franchises. They've put out Advance Wars and Contra games recently. The question is not so much why not just come up with a new IP as why approach THIS IP in THIS particular way. They had a ton of options, and this is what they chose. Maybe it will work out creatively and commercially, we'll see, but it just seems very arbitrary.

I like Panzer Dragoon and enjoy that 2011 Yar's Revenge game for PC/XBLA. It's better than Crimson Dragon.

@zombiepie: I actually played some of that game about a year ago. It's not too bad and it probably is better than Crimson Dragon, which is sort of a mess. If you like Panzer Dragoon-likes you don't have that many choices and the Yars game is at least competent and has some interesting aesthetics and mechanics.

But it was a really strange use of the property and kind of a weird game for the time and it flopped pretty predictably.