This was a novel feature at the time that was shared with Midway's contemporary arcade title Gorf, and had been pioneered a year earlier by Stern's, with "Berzerk".
The first Atari Force comics, which only counted 5 issues, were published in 1982 and were created mainly to illustrate story lines for home console games being released by fellow Warner Communications subsidiary Atari, Inc. The comics were packed in with the games Defender, Berzerk, Star Raiders, Phoenix, and Galaxian.
Whoever had the highest out of all eight on their team was selected to play against the two other highest-scoring players on an arcade game (Berzerk in this case) for the grand prize – their very own arcade game (Asteroids Deluxe, in this case) and an Apple II Home Computer System.