1986 · U.S. Gold

Gauntlet

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Atari's four-player arcade dungeon, squeezed onto a Commodore 64 for two players by Gremlin Graphics. Its home versions went to the top of the British chart, and it won the 1986 Golden Joystick for Game of the Year.

01 · The game

Two heroes against an endless dungeon

The title screen
The title screen.
Level 1 in play
Level 1: the Warrior at the top left, the status panel below.

Gauntlet is a dungeon crawl seen from above. One or two players each pick a hero, Thor the Warrior, Thyra the Valkyrie, Questor the Elf, or Merlin the Wizard, and fight their way down through a maze that scrolls with them. Generators pour out ghosts, grunts, demons, lobbers, and sorcerers, and Death walks among them. Each hero shoots, fights hand to hand, and carries potions that blast every monster on screen.

Health starts at 2000 and drains one point at a time whatever the players do, so the food scattered through the maze matters as much as the fighting. Keys open doors, treasure scores points, and an exit in the floor leads to the next level. The first seven levels are always the same; after that the game deals them at random from the disk, with a treasure room every few levels, and play goes on until the last hero's health runs out.

02 · The release

An Atari coin-op, converted by Gremlin for U.S. Gold

Gauntlet began as an Atari Games arcade machine, released in October 1985 and designed by Ed Logg. The cabinet took four players at once, and it was Atari's first coin-op with a speech chip, which gave the game a narrator's voice. The game's credits screen thanks Logg by name.

U.S. Gold published the Commodore 64 version in Europe in 1986, and Gremlin Graphics wrote the conversion. Its credits screen names Bob Armour as the game's programmer, Kevin Bulmer for the graphics, Bill Allen and Dave Partington for sound and additional programming, Stu Gregg and Jason Perkins for additional programming, and Ben Daglish for the music. It came on disk and on cassette. In North America the C64 version followed in September 1987 from Mindscape, whose manual covered the Commodore 64, Atari 8-bit and Atari ST versions in one booklet; C64-Wiki also lists OziSoft and ERBE Software among its publishers.

In 1987 Gremlin made an expansion, Gauntlet: The Deeper Dungeons, with 512 new levels, published by U.S. Gold in Europe and by Mindscape in the United States, for the Commodore 64 among other machines. The disk analysed on this site is U.S. Gold's original release, with its 128 levels.

03 · The reception

A number one, a Sizzler, and the Golden Joystick

SourceVersionVerdict
Zzap!64, issue 22, February 1987Commodore 6493 %, a Sizzler
UK sales chart, December 1986all home versionsnumber one
Golden Joystick Awards 1986the gameGame of the Year; runner-up, Arcade Game of the Year
UK salesall home versionsmore than 200,000 copies by 1987, over 300,000 by 1988

Contemporary verdicts. Scores and awards from the sources listed below; the sales figures and the chart position count every home version together.

The Commodore 64 magazine Zzap!64 gave the C64 version 93 % and its Sizzler award in its February 1987 issue. The home versions together went to the top of the UK sales chart in December 1986, and had sold more than 200,000 copies in Britain by 1987 and over 300,000 by 1988.

At the 1986 Golden Joystick Awards in London, Gauntlet won Game of the Year and came second as Arcade Game of the Year. The Deeper Dungeons did less well with the critics: reviewers found its levels much harder than the original's, and the consensus was that it fell a little short of the first game.

04 · Sources

Where these facts come from