Yars' Revenge began development as an Atari 2600 clone of the 1980 Cinematronics arcade game Star Castle. According to designer Howard Scott Warshaw, after he was assigned to the project, he found that a "decent version" of the game could not be made for the console. Instead, he analyzed Star Castle and took "the top logical and geometric components", or "what I thought was fun about it", and reconfigured and modified it to better suit the Atari 2600 as an original game.