Gauntlet Game

Live-action D&D

Gauntlet is a top-down hack and slash dungeon crawl video game, developed by Arrowhead Game Studios and published by Warner Bros.

The Gauntlet Arcade Version is a very old school game as it was originally on Arcade. It was developed by Atari Games in 1985. It a truly retro game for the retro gamers out there and is a great game to play if you are looking to start playing some retro games.

Atari, with love

The story of the Gauntlet Arcade Version is simply because to a certain extent, it doesn’t have a story, it focuses solely on its gameplay and graphics because it was an arcade game. The draw wasn’t the story but to complete and beat the 100 levels before the game beats you. If you failed, you would have to start all over again from the start. It makes you want to come back for more, it's slightly like the original Dark Souls some would say but that can be said about most arcade games.

It’s an Arcade Classic

The graphics for the game were great for 1985 with its attention to detail on the different levels to make them look different from the last, it makes you want to progress through Gauntlet Arcade Version. As well as the detail around the different characters to choose from and the enemies you go up against really add the sense that you’re progressing through the game and make you want to reach that level 100. It also has that retro feel which we’ve come to love over the years with indie games like Shovel Knight and Volgarr the Viking which has cemented the genre into the latest games. Making this game a must for any fans of retro games.

Four-player Gauntlet

The game is a four-player, top-down, third-person game with the objective of every level is to pick up a torch to exit the level to the next one. There are power-ups throughout the levels, the main character can pick up to get the edge in the battle against your enemies. The choice of character is Thor the Warrior, Merlin the Wizard, Thyra the Valkyrie and Questor the Elf, all have their details and their strengths and weaknesses. For example, the Warrior, Thor, is good at hand to hand combat. There’s a lot of detail within this game making the 100 level more interesting, the further you get.

Retro games never felt so good!

Gauntlet Arcade Version is a fantastic arcade game and shows how amazing some of the classic games from the Arcade era can be with this amazing gem. The game brings in some amazing detail with 100 levels and the choice between four different characters and power-ups. There so many details for a game made all the way back in 1985, it must have taken a lot of effort and hard work to make such a great game and everyone should find a way to play this great game.

Released in 1985, was the original four-player arcade game and is considered by many to be one of the great video games. Today at the Game Developers Conference, creator Ed Logg (who also worked on Asteroids and Centipede) gave a talk about designing way back when.

He revealed some facts even the biggest retro fans among you may not have heard.Facts such as. Dungeons+&+Dragons was inspired by the OG of role-playing games: Dungeons & Dragons. Logg's son kept begging him to make a D&D game, but he wasn't sure how to pull it off. Then he discovered a game called Dandy on the Atari 800 computer in 1983.

Dandy was a top-down dungeon crawler that also supported four players. Using this as his jumping off point, Logg set to work making a fancier version for the arcade in 1983. Codename:+DungeonsGauntlet was originally to be called Dungeons. It wasn't until April of 1985 that the Atari legal team told Logg that name wasn't available.

He changed it to Gauntlet on May 10, 1985, a title Logg remains very happy with. Two character names were also changed before release. The Valkyrie was originally named 'Amazon' and the Warrior was 'Hulk.' The first character art was produced on January 1, 1984.Wizard,+Warrior,+Valkyrie,+and+Elf More+Players+=+More+$$In the early '80s, arcades were struggling. Manufacturers created more elaborate games that operators could charge more money for ($.50!), but players were resistant to the increase. The question at Atari was: 'How do we get extra earnings?'

The idea with Gauntlet was that with four players you earn four times as much with every play. It was a drop-in/drop-out design so if someone died they could immediately rejoin or someone new could step in - there was no down time, so the quarters just kept coming. Another choice made specifically to increase the coin drop: there was no end to the game. Gauntlet would recycle levels by flipping them horizontally and vertically once the players had run through all of them. Gauntlet was a big success in 1985. But the marketing team at Atari was actually worried about the four-player cabinet.

They weren't sure four strangers would want to play a game together and they also had concerns about the four separate coin shoots (which were known to break easily). Confident in his game, Logg convinced the marketing team to just go with it. Japanese+SpiesIt was common practice to test a new arcade game at select locations before wide release. The operator was given the cabinet for free, but in exchange they couldn't promote it (as a precaution against competition) and they would share the coin drop numbers of it and all the other machines at the location so that Atari could evaluate the new game's success against current games. But when Logg came by to check on Gauntlet during its field test, he found developers from SEGA snapping photos of the cabinet.

Atari pulled it from that location and didn't work with the operator henceforth. A year after Gauntlet's release in 1985, SEGA released a four-player arcade game called Quartet (although it was side-scrolling).

7,850That's how many Gauntlet cabinets were sold in the U.S. A few thousand more were sold in Japan and Europe. Even though Atari considered Gauntlet a success, earlier games like Space Invaders and Ms. Pac-Man sold hundreds of thousands of cabinets.

One of Gauntlet's contemporaries from Atari, the excellent Temple of Doom game, sold just 2,800 copies. That was the official tagline used in Gauntlet promotional materials.

An animated commercial was also run in theaters, which was very unusual for arcade games.