Gauntlet (1985 video game)
Gauntlet is a 1985 fantasy-themed hack-and-slash arcade game developed and released by Atari Games. It is noted as being one of the first multiplayer dungeon crawl arcade games. The core design of Gauntlet comes from 1983 Atari 8-bit dungeon crawl game Dandy, which resulted in a threat of legal action. It also bears striking similarities to the action-adventure maze game Time Bandit (1983).
| Gauntlet | |
|---|---|
Arcade flyer | |
| Developer(s) | Atari Games (arcade) Tengen (NES) |
| Publisher(s) | Arcade Ports Tengen U.S. Gold |
| Designer(s) | Ed Logg |
| Programmer(s) | Bob Flanagan |
| Artist(s) | Sam Comstock Susan G. McBride Alan J. Murphy Will Noble |
| Composer(s) | Arcade/NES Hal Canon Earl Vickers Atari ST 2 Bit Systems Replay Amstrad/Spectrum Ben Daglish Master System Tiertex |
| Series | Gauntlet |
| Platform(s) | Arcade, Amstrad CPC, Atari ST, Apple II, Apple IIGS, Macintosh, Commodore 64, Atari 8-bit family, MSX, Master System, NES, Genesis, ZX Spectrum, MS-DOS, PlayStation |
| Release | Arcade
|
| Genre(s) | Hack and slash Dungeon crawl Maze |
| Mode(s) | Single-player, 4-player multiplayer |
| Arcade system | Atari Gauntlet |
The arcade version of Gauntlet was released in November 1985 and was initially available only as a dedicated four-player cabinet. Atari distributed a total of 7,848 arcade units. In Japan, the game was released by Namco in February 1986. Atari later released a two-player cabinet variant in June 1986, aimed at operators who could not afford or did not have sufficient space for the four-player version.