Before Gauntlet, an arcade game was something you played alone or took turns at. Ed Logg’s game for Atari Games put four joysticks on the front of one cabinet and four heroes in the same dungeon, all on screen at once. The players had to cooperate to survive, and they also had to share the food. The machine’s voice made sure they noticed. “I kind of liked when it would say, Wizard is eating most of the food,” Logg recalled, “to poke the other players into thinking ‘hey, are we gonna let him get away with that!’ It was co-operative up to the point when you needed or wanted something.”
Fast facts
- Designer: Ed Logg, whose earlier games included Asteroids and Centipede.
- Maker: Atari Games, the arcade company left behind when Warner sold Atari’s home business in 1984; see the Atari entry.
- Released: 1985, in the arcades.
- Players: up to four at once.
- Heroes: Thor the Warrior, Thyra the Valkyrie, Merlin the Wizard and Questor the Elf.
- Home versions in Britain: U.S. Gold, for the Spectrum, Commodore 64, Amstrad CPC, MSX and Atari ST; later the Sega Master System. In America, Mindscape and, for the NES, Atari Games’ own Tengen label.
- Reviews: 92% in CRASH and 93% in Zzap!64, February 1987; Amstrad Action’s Mastergame, January 1987.
Dungeons & Dragons in an arcade cabinet
Logg told Retro Gamer that he drew on Dungeons & Dragons and “a little known computer game called Dandy”, a 1983 dungeon game for the Atari 800 by John Palevich. To fill a dungeon with that many monsters, he and the engineer Pat McCarthy designed a four-layer circuit board that could change moving objects on the fly; Retro Gamer described it as double the size of anything Atari had built before. A professional was brought in to record the speech, “like a dungeon master telling you when you’d screwed up”. Atari took out five patents on the game’s ideas, four of them in Logg’s name. The company owned the rights, and Logg signed his over for $1. When he asked the lawyer for his dollar, the lawyer threw one at him, saying it was the last he would ever get. Logg framed it.
Each hero had different strengths. CRASH explained that strength decided how quickly a character killed monsters, armour how much damage a hit did, and magic how powerful a potion was. The Warrior hit hardest, the Wizard’s magic was strongest, the Valkyrie had the best armour and the Elf was fastest. Ghosts, grunts with clubs, lobbers that threw rocks over walls, fire-spitting demons and vanishing sorcerers poured out of generators until the generators were destroyed, and Death could only be beaten with magic. Food restored health, though some was poisoned, and shooting food destroyed it.
Health also ran down on its own as the players explored. A dead character could be brought back in the arcade by putting in another coin, so, as Retro Gamer put it, “only an unlimited amount of credits would get them to the deeper levels”. The cheaper plan was to team up. Retro Gamer also noted where arguments started: at an empty machine, over who got to play the Valkyrie.
Gauntlet II followed in 1986 and let two players choose the same hero. A third instalment, Catacombs, was to have taken the dungeon into three dimensions, until management decided they had had enough of Gauntlet. It came out in 1987 as Xybots.
U.S. Gold and the home conversions
In Britain the licence went to U.S. Gold. Its founder, Geoff Brown, signed Gauntlet and 720° with Atari Games and guaranteed the licensor large sums in advance (see the U.S. Gold entry). He asked Tony Porter and the artist Kevin Bulmer to drop the game they were writing and convert Gauntlet instead. As a condition of the job, Bulmer told Retro Gamer, they became employees of Gremlin Graphics and worked from new offices in Birmingham set up for the project. Porter programmed the Spectrum, Amstrad and MSX versions; CRASH credited the Spectrum game to Porter, Bulmer and Bill Allen.
Atari supplied no source code until the conversions were finished. “We worked out the intricacies of the game simply by playing it,” Porter said: they kept an arcade machine on free play in the office. What he found inside surprised him. The coin-op had a Z80, the same processor as the Spectrum and Amstrad, and its only job, he said, was to read the four joysticks and buttons. To keep the game fast with so many monsters, Porter drew them the same way as the walls, from character blocks rather than sprites. The 8-bit versions dropped the speech (“in practice it sounded awful and took up a huge amount of room”) and cut the players to two. On cassette the game could not pick levels at random as the arcade did, so it loaded a block of levels and chose among them.
CRASH made the Spectrum version a Smash in February 1987 with 92%. The graphics were small (“What puny little graphics,” one reviewer wrote, “but WOW! — what a game!”), but the gameplay made up for it, and the magazine singled it out as a game to play with a friend. It cost £8.99, loaded up to eight levels at a time and offered 512 levels in all. The first edition would not load on the new Spectrum +2 and could trouble Kempston joystick interfaces; U.S. Gold apologised, and shops exchanged it for a corrected copy with a buff-coloured inlay. Zzap!64 gave the Commodore 64 version 93%, “a first rate conversion of a first rate arcade game”, while marking its sound down to 31% for “simple jingles and poor spot FX”. The disk version picked levels at random; on tape they came in a fixed order. Amstrad Action made the Amstrad version its Mastergame in January 1987, and Computer and Video Games readers voted Gauntlet Game of the Year at the Golden Joystick Awards for 1986.
The Atari ST version was on sale in Britain by December 1987 at £24.99. Retro Gamer later judged it “probably the most faithful port of Gauntlet” of its day: it kept the speech and supported four players. The magazine had never seen the Amiga version U.S. Gold advertised.
In America, Mindscape published Gauntlet for the Atari 8-bit computers and the ST, advertising it with Paperboy in Antic at the end of 1987. Atari Games’ own label, Tengen, brought it to the NES in 1988; Nintendo Power covered it in its first issue, where the heroes’ quest ends with the defeat of Morak and his henchmen. Porter returned to the game once more as head of U.S. Gold’s Sega department, and wrote a two-player Master System version with speech.
Later
The series ran through Gauntlet Legends and Gauntlet: Dark Legacy to Gauntlet: Seven Sorrows in 2005, by which time both Atari Games and its successor, Midway Games West, had closed (see Atari Games). When Diablo arrived in 1997, Edge called it “essentially a Gauntlet clone”. The original came back on Xbox Live Arcade in the 2000s.
Sources
- Paul Drury, “Ed Logg” interview, Retro Gamer issue 29, 2006, pp. 74–79: Dungeons & Dragons and Dandy; Pat McCarthy and the board; the speech and “Wizard is eating most of the food”; the five patents and the $1; “don’t shoot food”; Gauntlet II, Catacombs and Xybots.
- “Conversion Capers: Gauntlet”, Retro Gamer issue 23, 2005, reprinted in Retro Gamer Collection vol. 1, 2007: Geoff Brown, Tony Porter, Kevin Bulmer and Gremlin’s Birmingham office; no source code, the arcade machine on free play and the Z80; monsters drawn as characters; speech dropped on 8-bit machines; the tape loading of levels; Bill Allen’s graphics tool; Dandy as a 1983 Atari 800 game by John Palevich; the Master System and Atari ST versions; the unseen Amiga version.
- Retro Gamer Collection vol. 1, 2007, Gauntlet feature: release in 1985, credits and the deeper levels, the Valkyrie, Xbox Live Arcade.
- CRASH issue 37, February 1987: p. 11, “Gauntlet Goof” (the loading problems and replacement copies); pp. 16–17, Spectrum review (credits, £8.99, character attributes, monsters, multi-load, 512 levels, 92%); p. 8, editorial on playing with a friend.
- Zzap!64 issue 22, February 1987, pp. 20–22: Commodore 64 review, £9.99 cassette and £14.99 disk, 93%.
- Amstrad Action issue 16, January 1987, pp. 63 and 68: Gauntlet as Mastergame.
- Computer and Video Games’ Golden Joystick Awards for 1986, as set out in the Golden Joystick Awards entry.
- Atari ST User, vol. 2 no. 10, December 1987: mail-order advertisement listing Gauntlet for the ST at £24.99.
- Antic, vol. 6 no. 8, December 1987: Mindscape advertisement for Gauntlet and Paperboy; vol. 6 no. 9, January 1988: Gauntlet 64K disk and Gauntlet ST in a mail-order list; vol. 7 no. 9, January 1989: Gauntlet and Gauntlet: The Deeper Dungeons listed as Mindscape titles for the Atari 8-bit computers.
- Nintendo Power issue 1, July/August 1988, pp. 70–73: the NES version, its heroes and Morak.
- David Sheff, Game Over (GamePress edition, 1999): Tengen’s first NES games, including Gauntlet, as set out in the Atari Games entry.
- Edge issue 42, February 1997: Diablo review, “essentially a Gauntlet clone”; Edge issue 149, May 2005: Gauntlet: Seven Sorrows and the closure of Atari Games and Midway Games West.
- “Gauntlet (1985 video game)”, Wikipedia (web, secondary): arcade release dates; health draining over time; reviving a dead character with a credit. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gauntlet_(1985_video_game)