Rygar | Code Like It's 198x

Rygar’s hero fights with a shield. The Diskarmor is a spiked disc on a chain, which he flings out and snaps back, so Wireframe could fairly describe Tecmo’s hero as wielding “a giant, deadly yo-yo”. The arcade game of 1986 was fast, colourful and, in Edge’s words looking back, “fiendishly, nightmarishly difficult”. The Famicom version that followed in 1987 kept the hero, the weapon and the name, and turned almost everything else into a different game: slower, with a map to explore, items to find and long stretches seen from above.

Fast facts

Developer: Tecmo. Its Japanese title was Argos no Senshi (“Warrior of Argos”).
Arcade: 1986.
Famicom and NES: Argos no Senshi: Hachamecha Daishingeki in Japan in April 1987; Rygar in America in 1987.
Home computers: Spectrum, Commodore 64 and Amstrad CPC versions by Probe Software, published by US Gold in late 1987.
Other versions: Sega Master System (Japan only, 1988); Atari Lynx (1990); a 3D remake, Rygar: The Legendary Adventure, for the PlayStation 2 (2002).
Weapon: the Diskarmor.

The arcade game

The arcade Rygar is a scrolling action game. The warrior runs from left to right through a fantasy landscape while monsters attack from every side, and the Diskarmor is the answer to all of them. It can be aimed, and skilled players learned to swing it round the warrior’s head. Revisiting the game in 1997, Edge picked out “the use of directional control over the extending weapon” and the small touches that gave it depth: changing direction in mid-air, jumping onto branches to avoid advancing creatures, “and even being able to hitch a lift on the backs of flying birds”.

The warrior grows stronger with power-ups, which “appear spontaneously, but progress requires keeping hold of them”, Edge explained. It counted five, and noted the catch: “Losing all power-ups immediately on contact with an enemy certainly proved frustrating”. Dawdle and the timer runs out, and a giant monster called Death comes to hurry you along; Retro Gamer added that after stage 19 there are no more continues.

Computer and Video Games reviewed the machine in October 1986, and its reviewer found it fiendishly difficult: every time he thought he was getting somewhere, a winged lizard would drop another attacker on him from the sky. What it had on its side was its looks. Edge called it “one of the new breed of coin-ops that led the charge to the increased resolution and colour palettes of the 16bit coin-op era”, with “beautifully colourful parallax scrolling”, but thought its gameplay “was lost on most people” and that the machine ended up “haunting the darkest corners of seaside arcades”.

The NES game

Tecmo, as Retro Gamer put it, “completely rethought Rygar for its NES debut”. The frenetic action was toned down for “a more considered action/adventure approach”. Rygar walks a connected world, collecting tools such as the grappling hook and Pegasus’s flute that open new routes, and gaining strength as he fights. Some areas are side-on platform levels; others are seen from overhead. One reader wrote to the first issue of Nintendo Power in 1988 to praise exactly that: “Usually a game has only one view on the character, but Rygar shows the intensity of combination.”

The game had no password and no battery save, so an adventure had to be finished in one sitting. Nintendo Power’s question pages carried the kind of help players needed. One reader had found Pegasus’s flute and did not know what to do with it; the answer was to climb the highest tower in the Rolsa valley, where playing the flute from the subscreen reveals the entrance to Ligar’s castle in the sky. Another reader, in a later issue, listed beating the game among his achievements: “In Rygar I defeated Ligar and saw the Door of Peace open.”

Wireframe’s history of Tecmo thought the NES version “really took things up a notch, with more weapons and plenty of exploration”.

Conversions

US Gold bought the home-computer rights and had Probe Software convert it for the Spectrum, Commodore 64 and Amstrad CPC. Its advertisements opened with a flourish, “From the Dawn of Time comes a Legendary Warrior to thrill players everywhere”, and priced the games at £8.99 for the Spectrum and £9.99 on cassette for the Commodore 64 and Amstrad.

The Spectrum version did not impress. CRASH gave it 58 per cent at the end of 1987; one reviewer found the graphics “dull and uninterestingly coloured” and the first level “far too easy”, while another enjoyed its “colourful parallax scrolling” once the easy early levels were out of the way. Sinclair User called the hero “a flickery, piddly little sprite with no facial details whatsoever”. Retro Gamer, comparing the versions years later, judged the Amstrad game “clearly the best version out of the 8-bit micros”. The computer versions were later reissued on the Kixx budget label.

The other conversions went their own ways. A Master System version, Argos no Juujiken, came out only in Japan in March 1988, made by a company called Salio. It stays closer to the arcade game than the Famicom version does, though it adds underground sections of its own; Retro Gamer thought it “not very good at all”. The Atari Lynx version of 1990 divided opinion: Retro Gamer thought it looked and played “brilliantly”, while Edge found it “colourful but rather weedy”.

Later history

In 2002 Tecmo revived the name for the PlayStation 2. Rygar: The Legendary Adventure was a 3D action game in which Rygar’s main weapon is still his shield, used most often in a “yo-yo-style attack”, and Edge reported that its developers had studied the films of Ray Harryhausen; its enemies would be familiar “to students of Homer”. Edge gave it seven out of ten and called it “an absorbing dozen hours of hit and myth adventure”. A version for the Wii followed in 2008, and the arcade original appeared in the Xbox compilation Tecmo Classic Arcade (2005).

Sources

Computer and Video Games issue 60, October 1986: arcade review of Rygar (its difficulty, the winged lizards).
Edge issue 43, March 1997, “Retroview”: the arcade game’s graphics and parallax scrolling, the directional weapon swung round the fighter’s head, mid-air turns, branches and birds, the five power-ups and losing them, its difficulty, the Lynx version.
Retro Gamer Collection volume 4 (2010), pp. 32–33: Rygar (the Death monster and the timer; no continues after stage 19; the NES, Lynx, Amstrad, Commodore 64, Master System and Spectrum versions compared, including the Master System game’s underground sections).
“Developer Profile: Tecmo”, Wireframe issue 35, March 2020, p. 52: the arcade game and the NES version (“a giant, deadly yo-yo”).
Nintendo Power issue 1, July/August 1988, p. 52 (Counselors’ Corner: Pegasus’s flute, the Rolsa valley and Ligar’s castle) and p. 96 (reader’s letter on the two views). Issue 3, November/December 1988, p. 100 (reader’s letter: defeating Ligar).
US Gold advertisement for Rygar, CRASH issue 46, November 1987, and Sinclair User issue 68, November 1987: the copy and the prices.
CRASH issue 48 (Christmas Special 1987), p. 19: Spectrum review (Probe Software, £8.99, 58 per cent overall).
Sinclair User issue 69, December 1987: Spectrum review.
Your Sinclair issue 24 (December 1987): Probe Software as the converters of Rygar.
ACE issue 17, February 1989: Kixx re-releasing Rygar (see Kixx).
Sega Retro, “Argos no Juujiken” (web, secondary): the Master System version, published by Salio in Japan on 25 March 1988, and how it differs from the Famicom version. https://segaretro.org/Argos_no_Juujiken
Edge issue 111, June 2002, p. 30: preview of the PlayStation 2 Rygar (the yo-yo-style attack, Harryhausen, Homer). Issue 119, January 2003: review, seven out of ten.
Retro Gamer issue 19 (2005): Tecmo Classic Arcade review (games included).
Edge issue 180, October 2007, p. 34: the Wii Rygar in development at Team Tachyon.
Wikipedia, “Rygar” (web, secondary): the Famicom and NES release dates; no password or save; the Lynx and Wii releases. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rygar
Wikipedia (Japanese), “アルゴスの戦士” (web, secondary): the arcade game in May 1986; the Famicom title and its release on 17 April 1987. https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/アルゴスの戦士