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When I was attending what is now Leeds Metropolitan University, I lived during the second year (1981) in a shared house in Headlingley. On the floor below me was a guy called Chris Terran. He had built an Acorn Atom computer from a kit, and he was an ardent book reader. Over time we became good friends. Thee years later, in 1984, when I was working at Micro Power, I was visiting Chris one or more evenings a week. I would stay chatting with him until as late as 2 in the morning, then ride home on my pedal bike, and be up at 8am the next morning to ride to Micro Power for 9am. Chris bought a BBC Micro and started playing around with it.

I asked him if he’d like to write a Defender clone for the BBC Micro and Acorn Electron. He had written an adventure game on his Acorn Atom for his own amusement, but never written an arcade-type game. Despite this, he said he was up for the challenge, Alan Butcher came to meet him in his bedsit, and Chris got on with the programming. During my regular visits Chris would show me his progress.

Once Chris had finished the BBC Micro version, Alan Butcher gave him an Acorn Electron, and Chris worked out how to get the game to work on this lesser-powered computer, using a smaller playing area, fewer sprites on the screen, and so on.

I commissioned the artwork for the game packaging, I wrote the sales copy for the ad and software inlay card, and Micro Power published the game as Gauntlet (Wiki link). It was a great success.

Chris Terran introduced me to science fiction author Philip K Dick (his books have been turned into the following films: Blade Runner, Total Recall, Minority Report, Paycheck, and A Scanner Darkly) – and also introduced me to non-fiction books like Douglas Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, though I only understood a small fraction of it! (Chris and his wife have a site on the web, and as he was such a good friend and a great influence, I’ve tried to get hold of him recently without success.)

Gauntlet is an 8-bit computer game written by Chris Terran and published in the UK by Micro Power. It was released on the Acorn Electron and BBC Micro in 1984 and on the Amstrad CPC in 1985.

The game is a clone of Defender. The player controls an X15 spacecraft, protecting canisters from the hostile Reeg forces. In the game, Reeg landers search the landscape for canisters. If a lander grabs a canister and makes it to the top of the screen, it turns into a mutant. The player must shoot the enemy ship to release a grabbed canister, but if it falls too far, then it's destroyed on impact. There are also other ships such as cruisers, which when hit, unleash buzzer ships.

The player has smart bombs available which destroy all on-screen enemies. On the higher levels there are additional enemy ships such as mine layers which are capable of launching killer ships, unless the player can destroy them quickly. If the player allows destruction of all canisters, then a hoard of mutants attack and the landscape completely disappears.