While Star Castle at a glance might look more simple than most video games that had come about by 1980, the technology used in it was rather groundbreaking. Star Castle was the first arcade video game that featured on screen enemies attacking the player with an experimental form of artificial intelligence. It also tried to appear more advanced than it really was in terms of graphics, as it used several color overlays on the screen to make objects different colors also used with Space invaders.
Star Castle did well for itself in arcades, although it was somewhat overshadowed by some of the mega hits of the era such as Space Invaders, Asteroids, Defender, and Pac-Man. Like most arcade successes of the time, it was licensed for home release, but with a much more interesting story than most other games.
Atari had picked up rights to Star Castle in 1981, but programming the game for the Atari 2600 VCS was proving to be a huge headache. Just as Atari had finally figured out a way to make the port possible, Cinematronics became fed up with waiting and pulled out of the agreement, then licensing Star Castle for the vector based Vectrex system.
Atari CEO Ray Kassar was quite peeved over this incident, and had the game released with slight alterations. It was called Yar's Revenge, with "Yar" being Ray spelled backwards. Interestingly enough, Yar's Revenge made a lot of money for Atari in 1982, while the Vectrex version of Star Castle, and for that matter, the entire Vectrex game system, fell by the wayside. In fact, Star Castle has never appeared in home console form since, but Yar's Revenge recently became available for the Nintendo Game Boy Color.
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