The graphics for the Neutral Zone are made up of bits and bytes of the actual program code for Yars' Revenge, laid out vertically, and counter-scrolling over each other. The game's creator Howard Scott Warshaw recalled in an interview with Digital Press that Atari feared showing the game's code on-screen would be a potential copyright violation, but Warshaw explained to them that "besides the scrolling, there was some X-Y and random color processing being done to it" to prevent the raw code from being displayed, stating that "if somebody could get the code from that, then they deserved it!" This same technique was employed by Retro Studios to create static noise textures during the development of the Nintendo GameCube game Metroid Prime.