Gauntlet – “You have found a treasure room”

The August 1987 issue of Spectrum magazine Crash brought back an old feature “after almost three years in the cupboard”: the comparison test. The first one of these had been way back in the second issue in March 1984, when Crash rated six different Spectrum games all obviously based on Donkey Kong. Now, in 1987, their seven identikit games of interest involved an overhead view and gameplay “somewhere between arcade adventures and shoot-’em-ups”. “There’s usually some kind of quest, often an obscure one, more often than not, it’s to escape from somewhere. En route you pick up objects such as health potions, power pills, treasure and ammunition to increase your character’s efficiency.” The hit of Donkey Kong proportions that inspired this copycat boom was Gauntlet.

Gauntlet was released in arcades in October 1985. The concept for it came out of a somewhat tough time for new arcade games in the USA. Its lead developer Ed Logg explained at the Games Developers Conference in 2012 that by 1984, a degree of saturation had made it more difficult to persuade venues to buy new machines unless they had something big going for them. Atari laid off employees on the arcade side of its business, as well as the console side where it had faced a massive North American crash. Indeed, Gauntlet was delayed because its original hardware engineer had to move to another game as a result. Ed Logg’s key idea that made it stand out was a way to get around resistance to increasing the price of playing arcade games. His game would still cost 25 cents a play, but now four people could put in their coins to play at once.

The game he applied this four player concept to was a top-down dungeon crawler with theming of a Dungeons & Dragons nature. Back in 1983, Logg’s son had been asking him to make a Dungeons & Dragons game and he was struggling to work out how to do it. Then he played a game called Dandy, its own D&D inspirations visible in its name, and he saw the way forwards. In that same GDC talk, he acknowledged taking several of Gauntlet’s key ideas from Dandy. This is also very obvious from playing Dandy. 

Dandy started off as Jack Pavelich’s bachelor thesis at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He conceived a game to be played across two computers, with one person acting as the dungeon master on one Atari 800, and up to four players as the adventurers on the other. Pavelich had never actually played Dungeons & Dragons, having been abroad during its peak popularity with his friends, but bought a set of its manuals nonetheless and used those to inform his game, which he initially called Thesis of Terror.

The plan for the dungeon master role fell through but, with some help from fellow student Joel Gluck, Pavelich did create his game, and pass his degree. When he graduated and got a job at Atari, he made some revisions to the code, and they released it as Dandy. It was fairly basic graphically (its players are each represented by the same stickperson with a large number 1-4 over them) and has only one type of enemy. But it already had much of Gauntlet in place: grid-based overhead view, large scrolling maps, keys, numerical health counter, food to replenish health, and destructible enemy generators. It also had co-operative multi-player tactics for up to four players, and Atari advertised it with that at the forefront.

When Gauntlet came out, “look[ing] a lot like a polished and expanded version of Dandy”, Pavelich later wrote, “it took me by surprise”. No longer working for Atari, he got in touch with them and “took legal steps to ensure that my rights to sell and further develop the original Dandy game were protected”. (Not the last legal dispute I will be covering in this post). He also asked for his name to be added to the Gauntlet credits. 

Atari fobbed him off, claiming it would be too expensive to update. He let up, and they didn’t add him into any future versions either. The fact he didn’t take that further perhaps reflected in part affection for Atari, who had provided his “dream job”, or expectations shaped by the widespread murkiness of game credits at the time. Pavelich did manage to negotiate for Atari to provide him with his own Gauntlet arcade machine, which he “kept and enjoyed for many years”.

Gauntlet’s debt to Dandy is clear, but Ed Logg and colleagues added a lot as well. Much of that was in scale. They stretched the available technology to put an incredible number of enemies on screen at any one time. They created more than a hundred levels, with an initial eight level tutorial (skippable via a more difficult-to-reach exit on level 1) and then levels which would play in a different order each time. 

Aside from that, graphical improvements brought the setting to life a lot more. And they gave the four different player characters not just different looks but different strengths (such as the fast Elf and the tank Valkyrie), further increasing the range of available tactics. Gauntlet partly reversed one of Pavelich’s key decisions, on whether players are able to harm each other, maintaining Dandy’s peace in early levels before introducing an element of rivalry as the game progressed. Put all that together and Gauntlet offered a balance of unpredictable quick action and deeper tactics, with an engaging social element in a form that was novel to arcades. 

The appeal of Gauntlet was obvious right from its first field tests, where it made money quicker than almost anything else Atari had seen. Logg says that it was also the only game of his to have a field test ended early for security reasons, after they spotted Sega employees checking out the game. Gauntlet was a huge success in the UK as well (as Commodore User wrote the following year, “if you’ve been in any arcades recently, you can’t help but notice the crowd of people standing around Gauntlet, the biggest game of ‘86”). Inevitably, that meant a home computer version was on the cards.

The licence for Gauntlet went to U.S. Gold. In 1985, Ocean, whose owners had a large stake in U.S. Gold, suffered the chastening experience of being beaten to the Commando licence, and the #1 slot in the UK charts for Christmas 1985, by Elite, “these guys on top of a fish and chip shop in Walsall”. Ocean and U.S. Gold responded by splashing a lot more cash on arcade game licences, securing multi-game exclusive deals with companies where they could. Plus, as U.S. Gold owner Geoff Brown told Chris Wilkins and Roger Kean for their history of his company, “it was like a snowball, the more licences I bought, the more I got, and the more people came to me to do them“. He visited Atari in California, saw Gauntlet, thought it was “absolutely awesome” and agreed a deal there and then.

In 1985, Brown also splashed his cash in a different way by acquiring a controlling stake in Gremlin Graphics, developers of games including #1 hits Monty on the Run and The Way of the Tiger. He persuaded Gremlin’s owners to issue new share capital and then bought it up himself. In an interview for Mark Hardisty’s book A Gremlin in the Works, Brown recounted his motivation in this as having been that “it seemed like an intellectually fun challenge to see if I could take over Gremlin”. Intellectual satisfaction wasn’t the only thing he got out of it, of course. U.S. Gold lacked its own developers, and acquired the Gauntlet licence right around the time that Ocean had proved spectacularly unreliable with World Cup Carnival. Brown handed Gauntlet to Gremlin to make, with strict instructions to have it ready in time for Christmas.

U.S. Gold weren’t the only ones hoping to capitalise on demand for a home version of Gauntlet. Rod Cousens, head of Activision subsidiary Electric Dreams, thought that he had secured the licence before finding out it had gone to U.S. Gold. Electric Dreams made a Gauntlet-style game anyway, and came up with an ingenious ready-made solution to any accusations of stealing from Gauntlet, which was to sign up the rights to Dandy. They then took things a bit further by planning to put their game out under the name Dauntless. U.S. Gold’s lawyers suggested they reconsider and Electric Dreams agreed “amicably” to go with Dandy. Their game, which visually looked a lot more like Gauntlet than the basic original Dandy, reached #17 in the UK chart a couple of months ahead of the official Gauntlet’s release.

Around the same time, BT’s Firebird label put out a game called Druid, by British teenagers Dene Carter and Andrew Bailey. Druid was a top-down fantasy adventure game with large scrolling levels and some more complex ideas like using different magic spells which are effective against different enemies. Carter and Bailey had been influenced in part by seeing Gauntlet midway through development, something it is not hard to see. With one of Druid’s treasure chest collectibles being a spell to create a tough golem that (on some formats) could be controlled by a second player, it even had a small element of the same kind of asymmetrical co-operative tactics. 

Reviewers had some fun with the resemblance. Graham Taylor in Sinclair User wrote that “This game is not Gauntlet. It has no connection with Gauntlet and just because the whole look of the game and gameplay is somewhat Gauntletesque I wouldn’t want you to come away from this review with the impression. Hope that’s clear.” Commodore User ended their review by saying that “It will sell in huge quantities unless the legal boys start to get nasty”. Atari did indeed threaten legal action, but Carter provided documentary evidence of Druid’s pre-Gauntlet designs and influences and it was enough to fend them off. Druid reached #2 in the UK chart behind Paperboy at the end of September 1986.

Elsewhere in the Commodore User review, they predicted a lot more similar games to come. “Just as Fist-type games characterised late ‘85 and ‘86, prepare for an onslaught of Druid-esque games”. They were right in all aspects but one; the trend would not be named after Druid. The Way of the Exploding Fist had been heavily influenced by the arcade game Karate Champ, but being the first popular one-on-one martial arts game on home computers had proved enough to give Fist the status of genre progenitor. The same did not go for Druid, because Gauntlet was a success in British arcades on a whole different scale from Karate Champ. Gauntlet already had a recognition value demonstrated by the frequency of its mentions in reviews of Dandy and Druid.

For Gremlin Graphics’s Gauntlet conversion, Kevin Bulmer worked on graphics across various versions, with Bill Allen, Alex Thirlwall and Ben Dalglish on sound and music. Commodore 64 programming was handled by Bob Armour, with additional support from Jason Perkins and Stuart Gregg. With a hint of nominative determinism, the Spectrum and CPC ports were handled by Tony Porter. The group of developers were a “circle of geeks” with some credits behind them, including in Porter’s case the Spectrum version of Barry McGuigan’s Boxing. 

They got in touch with U.S. Gold on hearing of its acquisition of the rights to Gauntlet, an arcade favourite of theirs, and became the core of a new Birmingham branch of Gremlin Graphics. As Porter told Retro Gamer in 2006, they faced a problem common at the time, in a lack of support from Atari. “We didn’t get to see any source code for the arcade version until well after we had completed the conversions. We worked out the intricacies of the game simply by playing it – we had an arcade machine on free play in the office.” They shared several elements between the different versions, including a common level editor.

They worked out ways to compress maps and even to provide some of the arcade game’s different level ordering from play to play, all while minimising tape loading as best as they could. This involved reflecting levels left/right or up/down. An even bigger problem was posed by the number of enemies. “The volume of sprites certainly was an issue, but we eventually resolved it by making the monsters up out of characters (they are actually drawn the same way as the level walls) […] they did move around, turn and act the same as their sprite counterparts from the arcade, and by taking this approach we could keep the essential game speed up”. 

When they eventually did get hold of the code to the arcade machine, Porter made an interesting discovery, spotting some code that looked familiar from his experiences with the Z80-powered Spectrum and CPC. He typed it in and disassembled it to work out its purpose. “While we were trying to write the whole thing – logic, graphics, sound, the whole ball game – on a Z80 processor, the arcade machine used the same processor solely to read the joysticks, buttons and coin slots!”

According to programmer Stuart Gregg, the Z80 versions were mastered on the day of U.S. Gold’s Christmas party, and Bob Armour still hadn’t finished work on the C64 version. They just about made it for Christmas, and got some very positive reviews. Crash reported that the Spectrum version “turned out to be a much better game than any of its clones”, was “just as playable as the arcade machine” and “retains the fast screen scrolling”. In Popular Computing Weekly, John Cook reviewed the CPC version and called it “at least as good as it could be on a home micro”. In Commodore User, Eugene Lacy called Gauntlet “definitely the most exciting coin-op conversion ever for the 64”.

Gauntlet entered the UK chart at #1 in December, on almost the last chart before Christmas. It stayed at the top for ten weeks. After it started to fall down, U.S. Gold released a rather ahead-of-its-time expansion pack called Gauntlet: The Deeper Dungeons, with 512 more levels that could be played by anyone with the original game. This was thanks to a decision in the programming that allowed other cassettes to be swapped in while playing. U.S. Gold ran a competition for people to submit levels and filled up much of it that way. The Deeper Dungeons went to #4 on the chart in its own right in April 1987.

Similar games continued to proliferate, though none of the ones Crash identified for their round-up got to the top of the charts. It’s worth returning to how Crash characterised its Gauntlet copycats for that comparison test. Overhead views, shooting elements, quests, keys, potions, treasure. None of those things originated with Gauntlet. By the Crash definition, it wouldn’t take much of a stretch to call 1983’s Atic Atac a Gauntlet-type game.

For that matter, under the same definition Nintendo’s The Legend of Zelda, with its sword beams and bow and arrows, qualifies as a Gauntlet clone too. In reality it released too soon after Gauntlet to have taken any likely influence from it and, the occasional Reddit post aside, no one has claimed it did. Zelda‘s own likely lineage has most often been named as involving The Tower of Druaga and Hydlide. (According to the Stampers, you can also add Sabre Wulf.)

Looking at The Tower of Druaga, with its fantasy mazes and treasures, you could easily suggest an influence from there on the later Gauntlet (Arcade Idea did when writing about it). Dandy, and Gauntlet’s initial designs, came before it, though, so the similarity between Gauntlet and The Tower of Druaga seems more likely to have been just the product of parallel evolution from a Dungeons & Dragons starting point. Jack Pavelich similarly felt the need with Dandy to mention that, contrary to assumptions, he hadn’t actually played its seemingly obvious predecessor Rogue. Every game has inspirations, but the web of them here had already got a lot more complex than games that aimed to copy Donkey Kong in its entirety. There are a lot of games that look like Gauntlet, and not all of them are from after it.

These questions of what made Gauntlet what it was take on more significance in the context of the shortcomings of the home version. For all Gremlin Graphics’s valiant efforts, their Gauntlet was, alongside Dragon’s Lair and Paperboy, one more 1986 home computer game which lacked the most distinctive feature of the arcade machine it was based on. All of the home versions only allowed for two players, rather than four.

The Gauntlet that was #1 for ten weeks had its defining gameplay element of four players removed (there was an addendum to Crash‘s definition of a Gauntlet variant, clearly based on the home version: “If we’re really going by the book, the game should have a two-player option”). With that and Gremlin’s other enforced compromises on size and style, it’s arguable whether their Gauntlet was much more Gauntlet in spirit than some of the better-made of the apparent clones. It was Gauntlet in name and iconography, though, and that turned out to count for an awful lot.

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Sources:

• Gauntlet revisited by creator Ed Logg, Gamespot YouTube channel, 2012
• A history of Dandy Dungeon, Jack Pavelich, Jack’s Hacks, 2013, accessed via the Wayback Machine
• The Story of U.S. Gold, Chris Wilkins & Roger M. Kean, Fusion Retro Books, 2015
• A Gremlin in the Works 1983-2015, Mark James Hardisty, Bitmap Books, 2016
• Memories of Firebird: The Unofficial and Unauthorised History, Richard C. Hewison, Telos Publishing, 2024
• Conversion Capers: Gauntlet, Retro Gamer No. 23, March 2006
• Dynamic Dungeons, Ricky Eddy and Robin Candy, Crash No. 43, August 1987, accessed via Spectrum Computing
• Dandy advert, Softline No. 3.2, November-December 1983, accessed via Computer Gaming World Museum
• Screen Star – Druid, Eugene Lacey and Frank Byrne, Commodore User No. 36, September 1986, accessed via the Internet Archive
• Gauntlet vs Dauntless dispute, Popular Computing Weekly Vol. 5 No. 38, 18-24 September 1986, accessed via Spectrum Computing
• Arcade review – Dandy/Druid, Graham Taylor, Sinclair User No. 56, November 1986, accessed via Spectrum Computing
• Gauntlet, Crash No. 37, February 1987, accessed via Spectrum Computing
• Running the Gauntlet, John Cook, Popular Computing Weekly Vol. 5 No. 49, 4-10 December 1986, accessed via Spectrum Computing
• Screen Star – Gauntlet, Eugene Lacey, Commodore User No. 40, January 1987, accessed via Amiga Magazine Rack

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