Please login to submit a screenshot

The Making of Gauntlet
=======================
Format: Arcade
Release: 1985
Publisher: Atari
Developer: In-house

By the mid-’80s, Ed Logg, creator of Asteroids and Centipede, had already established himself as a game developing legend in an industry that was just a little over a decade old. While his first two hits were probably his biggest financial successes and most well known, Logg’s 1985 introduction of Gauntlet pioneered a series of lasting gaming and design elements still reflected in today’s games. For developers, Gauntlet ushered in a series of core building blocks like multiplayer co-operative/competitive-style gaming, class-based characters, a non-linear playing field and a pay-per-play system where coins bought players health.

Just a few years past the 1980 introduction of Asteroids, the coin-operated market was no longer dominant. Coin-op developers were facing new competition from the attention-grabbing home console market. Even within Atari, there was an internal struggle which caused the company to split in two directions: Atari Games Corp became the coin-op division, and Atari Corp took the rest of the business – home console and computer games.

To stay in play, coin-op developers needed to outdo the home console games. “No longer could we get by with just a simple game. You could find these on all the home consoles and we wanted and needed to do something that would make the players come to the arcades. Games became more complex,” says Logg. In addition, coin-op developers became slaves to feature creep: “When one game adds, say, a high score feature, all games thereafter have to do the same thing.”



It’s no surprise that Gauntlet, originally titled Dungeons, was inspired by Dungeons & Dragons. “My son was big into Dungeons & Dragons at the time and he was begging me to make a Dungeons & Dragons game. I had no idea how to do this until a co-worker, Robin Zeigler, brought in a new Atari game, called Dandy. Not only was it fun and innovative, but it gave me that spark to create a game with all the Dungeons & Dragons features I wanted in a multiplayer game.”

Jack Palevich, Dandy’s creator, tried fruitlessly to get his name included in the credits for Gauntlet. In lieu of public recognition, Atari Games Corp gave Palevich a Gauntlet cabinet. Logg’s original game development documents describe Gauntlet as a classic Dungeons & Dragons adventure: “Players must navigate the maze, kill the nasties, eat food, collect treasures, open doors and find their way deeper into the dungeon until they reach the Hall Of Death. This is the final resting place of lost goodies. They will grab as much treasure as they want and try to escape back to daylight thus ending the game.”

When finally released, Gauntlet had no end, no Hall of Death and no escape to daylight. With its revolutionary non-linear design, Gauntlet gave players multiple choices. They were no longer forced into playing the game over a predetermined route. Like Dungeons & Dragons, Gauntlet players could choose their own path, searching for keys, treasures, food and transporters to get to other levels. Unlike many games, you didn’t always have to fight off the bad guys – sometimes you could find another route and escape.


The game was originally planned to feature stone hallways and incidental detail to provide atmosphere that's noticably missing from the actual release

With the switchover from the 6502 to the more capable 68000 microprocessor, the development environment at Atari had changed considerably. “We were actually entering our own code at this point. Our development tools changed, too. We were now programming in C instead of assembly language,” says Logg. “We no longer entered our programs into the development environment by paper tape.” And the list goes on. All the advances had made development considerably easier, and the processor could handle many more instructions, but the games were definitely more complex.

Gauntlet’s unique solutions for gameplay garnered Atari Games Corp five patents. One of the patents dealt with a streamlined method to determine collisions for the numerous objects on the screen – a common hurdle for early game developers. “Normal collision code tests 1,000 objects with the other 1,000 objects resulting in 1,000,000 collision checks,” says Logg. Programmers could reduce this number but that often introduced a processing overhead. Logg’s new method reduced both the overhead and collision tests to the lowest number possible. Commonly, nine collision tests were required for every object. Depending on the object’s direction and its position, Logg could drop that collision testing to just three.

The cabinet was also quite unusual. It was large and players viewed the screen from different angles instead of just straight on: “I decided I did not want to have a Plexiglas shield in front of the monitor. I did this to reduce glare, which became unsolvable from four different viewpoints. [In those days having] no Plexiglas was unheard of, and many operators thought it was unsafe, despite our demonstrations dropping steel balls onto monitors,” Logg says.

Although he is credited as the game’s developer, Logg tips his hat to engineer Pat McCarthy for designing the hardware and to co-programmer Bob Flanagan for covering the development process while Logg went on sabbatical.

“[With the advent of home consoles] No longer could we get by with just a simple game. You could find these on all the home consoles and we wanted and needed to do something that would make the players come to the arcades. Games became more complex. When one game adds, say, a high score feature, all games thereafter have to do the same thing.” Ed Logg

Prior to 1985, videogames were generally isolated to singleplayer games – man versus machine. Twoplayer games were either purely competitive, like Tank, or turn-based like Pac-Man. Gauntlet introduced a simultaneous Man + man + man + man vs machine type of gameplay, and there were many advantages to this new concurrent multiplayer game. Gauntlet was more social, as gamers had to co-operate and talk to each other in order to clear a level of the dungeon. But that co-operation often strayed as players turned against each other competing for food, keys and treasure.

Enhancing this need for co-operation was Gauntlet’s introduction of class-based characters. When you walked up to the game, you got to choose a protagonist – Warrior, Elf, Valkyrie or Wizard, and each had different strengths and weaknesses. A deficiency in one character could be supplanted by an asset of another. For example, while the Warrior is slow and strong, the Elf is weak but fast. Although the variables were simplistic, the teamwork spawned from Gauntlet’s class-based system can be seen in all sorts of multiplayer sports, adventure, and firstperson shooter games today.



Synthesised voice had been sporadically used in games in the early ’80s. It was introduced as a novelty, but with Gauntlet the voice became a constant presence, acting as a constant guide or dungeon master. Most notably, players laughed at the poor sap who was told by the machine that he “needs food badly”. The dungeon master provided humour and a launching point for animosity among players. Logg and team were aware of what they were doing: “We just used the voice to give this impression and provide comic relief as well as pointing out helpful or not so helpful things like, ‘the wizard has eaten all the food lately’” – which of course was a sure indication the other players would turn on the wizard.

Field tests for new coin-op games are a well-guarded secret. They’re a chance for developers to test players’ interest and decide how much revenue the game could pull in. However, before Atari Games Corp could find out, someone blew Gauntlet’s cover. Word leaked out that there was a new four-person multiplayer game in a small arcade in San Jose, California. Reports came in that Sega and other game manufacturers had shown up at the arcade and begun taking pictures.

Fearing that the competition had their eyes on stealing the game, Logg quickly instructed the management to pull the game. It was a necessary defensive move that, unfortunately, didn’t allow Logg’s team to witness even a full week of testing. That wasn’t a problem, as the little testing Logg did see proved that Gauntlet was about to change the way people played games: “There was a sign above the game that said play was limited to a certain number of tokens while others were waiting. I saw players dump large numbers of tokens into the game at one time. I had never seen this before. I must say it really made my day,” recalls Logg.



Logg has met and witnessed great Asteroids and Centipede players, but never any great Gauntlet players. That’s because to become a great Gauntlet player you had to play by yourself. Gauntlet was rarely a singleplayer game, and other players became an unknown variable you couldn’t control. “After releasing Gauntlet in Japan, we heard rumours of players who could play forever,” remembers Logg. Not believing it, Logg’s team received a video showing it actually being done. “So we had to add code that would start removing food from the level if we detected players playing this well.”

The reason solo players flourished in Japan rather than elsewhere is because new players there would often ask permission to join. Unfortunately for them, the answer was often ‘no’. In the US arcades, players wouldn’t bother asking and would just drop their quarters into the machine. Japanese gaming culture prevented others from joining in, thus negating Gauntlet’s multiplayer playability and its revenue potential.

To arcade owners, Gauntlet’s most amazing achievement was its ability to quickly generate revenue. One arcade operator in Toronto, Canada, would always thank Logg for giving him Gauntlet because it earned him the most money of any game he had ever had. He raked in a whopping $2,000 in a week, and that was enough to pay for the game in less than two weeks.

Even though the concept of multiplayer gaming had yet been tested, Logg knew gamers were eager to play co-operatively: “At one time, marketing clearly asked: ‘How do we get total strangers to play together?’ I guess the answer is to build a great game. I’m glad I had a chance to prove them wrong.”

This is an edited version of a feature that originally appeared in E144.