The Original Dungeon Crawl

Nearly twenty years before Microsoft brought gamers together with Xbox Live®, Atari® introduced an arcade game which brought players together in cooperation and competition like no game before it.

Gauntlet® , originally released in 1985, was the creation of Ed Logg, whose prior contributions for Atari included work on landmark hits such as Centipede, Asteroids, and Xybots.

Gauntlet was a dungeon-crawling, monster-fighting game which owed much of its inspiration to Dungeons & Dragons. Games had sent players into dungeons to fight monsters and ransack treasure before, such as Exidy's Venture, but never before Gauntlet had the visuals of the game been so lush, from the texture of the stone walls of the labyrinthine dungeon to the swirl of the Wizard's cloak.

Often, the most crowded machine in the arcade.

You guided a fighter through several dozen levels of dungeon, populated with monsters, treasure, magic potions, and monster-spawners which generated the swarms of enemies that often threatened to surround and overpower the party.

Character Selection
New was that you could, for the first time, pick your own style of fighter to represent yourself: brute Warrior, long on muscle, short on speed and magic; nimble Elf, able to dart in and out of a fight like a dancer but packing very little sting; powerful Wizard, slinging destructive fireballs but dangerously short on armor, or the Valkyrie, a compromise on all qualities of speed, toughness, and fighting ability.

The game pioneered cooperative gameplay.

The most important difference was that although the game was a blast to play on your own, the game truly shone when three other players lined up in front of the cabinet, grabbed the controls for their own character, and all four players stormed the dungeon together.  The large, wide cabinet had an individual set of controls—joystick, fight/fire button, and magic attack—for each of the players, along with a character outline and description on the front panel.

Party Combat
The game encouraged strategy and cooperation. The (for its time) massive library of recorded speech effects even poked fun at the player who didn't quite play fair with the others.  Quotes from the game's speech synthesizer became humorous slang for many players, and the lines ("Warrior needs food badly! Elf is ABOUT TO DIE!" "Don't SHOOT FOOD!") were re-recorded and used in later iterations of the game on different home consoles.

It was always a blast going down into that dungeon
with a couple of players that hopefully had your back.

Another Gauntlet innovation was the removal of 'virtual immortality' in video games. Games typically gave players a series of lives, usually three, depending on the operator who owned the machine and governed its settings. Gauntlet gave one life, with a set number of life points which steadily counted down over time, and dropped rapidly when under attack or being wounded.

It forced you to play with a combination of aggressiveness and cagy caution, as it was easy to get into a battle that would rapidly overwhelm and kill the character.

Evolution over Time
Gauntlet 's popularity and its unique style—lots of fighting and action, and total ease of play—has seen it crop up in one form or another on nearly every home platform since 1985, from the Commodore 64 to current-gen platforms. Though the newest releases have seen the game evolved into a 3-D action game, Xbox Live Arcade has brought Gauntlet back in its original perfection, also with graphics enhanced to high-definition for Xbox 360™.

Recreate the arcade experience on Xbox 360.

Every aspect of the game has been perfectly preserved, from the scoreboards to the speech synthesis, and with Xbox Live, the same phenomenon of four folks meeting, picking a character and then jumping into a dungeon full of monsters to fight for points, treasure, glory, and bragging rights is back.

Next-Generation Enhancements
Achievements reward teamwork as well as skill, with achievements for beating levels with other players (Co-Op, Co-Op Master) as well as for playing a match with a full roster of four (Max Co-Op). Achievements like Bling award treasure hunters, and individual achievements for each character type reward the high-scoring player.

With the the perfect characteristics of a truly successful game, Gauntlet has endured for decades. Xbox Live has brought back the qualities of it that made it the most fun game in the arcade—it was always a blast going down into that dungeon with a couple of players that hopefully had your back, and often became friends if they weren't already.

Within a growing stable of retro arcade classics on Xbox Live Marketplace, Gauntlet stands out as one of the games that was meant for multiplayer from the beginning, and is an absolute natural for the Xbox Live community.