Facts You Never Knew About Gauntlet

Seven Facts You Never Knew About Gauntlet

Gauntlet creator Ed Logg talks the Hulk and Japanese spies.
by Daemon Hatfield

Released in 1985, Gauntlet 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, Gauntlet creator Ed Logg (who also worked on Asteroids and Centipede) gave a talk about designing Gauntlet way back when. He revealed some facts even the biggest retro fans among you may not have heard.

Facts such as...

Dungeons & Dragons
Gauntlet 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: Dungeons
Gauntlet 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.

"Hulk is about to die!"
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 Spies
It 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).

It 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).

7,850
That'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.

"The most fun a quarter can buy!"
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. Behold: