That title is probably confusing unless like me you grew up playing the computer game Gauntlet. This is an old school dungeon crawler where you look down on your character and wade through a seemingly endless series of dungeons battling thousands of minions alongside your fellow heroes. It was a multi-player game, which sounds like something that isn’t worth mentioning, but co-op games were not the norm back in the day. In fact it was one of the first multi-player arcade games ever. It was also in the era where a lot of the best games came from the arcade machines and if they were really popular they might progress to one of the relatively basic personal computers or games consoles that were around at the time. That’s actually pretty remarkable and although the landscape has completely shifted these days, and arcades are now very limited, they used to be the frontier for games.
Gauntlet came out in 1985 and at the time it was pretty ground-breaking. Gauntlet was basically the grand-daddy of a lot of fantasy games. This spawned a whole host of other games where the game was a bit more advanced like Golden Axe, a sideways scrolling game with special moves! Altered Beast was another side scrolling adventure game that was favourite of mine where you and another player could shape change from a human into a werewolf for one level and a dragon for another.
I grew up in a seaside town where there were many arcades for the tourists, but a few of them were really orientated at locals with the better games at the back and pool tables. I spent a lot of Saturday mornings feeding 10 pence coins into arcade machines and having countless hours of fun. Gauntlet was an epic game and unlike a lot of games if you had even a little bit of skill you got your money’s worth. You could get about five to ten minutes of play out of one credit.
Well it’s finally happened. I’m delighted to say that Gauntlet is coming back. You will be able to get it from Steam for the PC this summer and I cannot wait to play it. The graphics, sounds, gameplay and everything else has obviously been updated to modern standards, but from what I’ve seen so far, the core of the game remains. An aerial view, dungeon crawler where each of the four different character classes has a strength and weakness. You can hopefully pick your colour, you pick your class and off you go, battling a seemingly endless sea of minions for treasure. Arrowhead Games have developed it and it will be coming out this summer. Count me in!
Stephen Aryan 