Gauntlet review: four heroes, one exit, and never enough food

Four heroes stand at the entrance of a dungeon: a warrior, a valkyrie, a wizard and an elf. The screen is full of ghosts and grunts pouring out of little generators, and somewhere beyond them is the exit. Gauntlet asks four players to get there together, and then quietly makes it very hard to stay friends on the way.

Four heroes, four jobs

The characters are Thor the warrior, Thyra the valkyrie, Merlin the wizard and Questor the elf, and each one is built for a job. The warrior hits hardest up close, the wizard has the strongest magic, the valkyrie has the best armor, and the elf is the fastest. Each player gets an eight-way joystick and two buttons, one to fire and one for magic, and a team that uses its strengths moves through the maze far faster than four people playing alone side by side.

The monsters never stop on their own. They pour out of generators, and the generators can be destroyed. So the first real lesson is to stop shooting the stream and go after the source. Then there is Death, the most dangerous thing in the dungeon, which drains your health and can only be destroyed with a magic potion.

Health that runs out by itself

Here is Gauntlet's cleverest and most profitable rule: your health drains on its own, even if nothing touches you. It is a clock disguised as a life bar. Food restores it, and there is never enough food for four.

When you die, you can drop in another coin and come right back with full health. In theory you can keep playing forever. The game has an answer for that, though: your final score is divided by the number of credits you used. It lets anyone keep going and still tells the truth about who played well.

Gauntlet was a cooperative game right up until someone reached for the food.

What it meant back then

Gauntlet was one of the first multiplayer dungeon crawlers in the arcade, and at first it came only as a four-player cabinet, with a control panel wider than other uprights so four people could stand at it at once. In an American mall arcade that meant something new: you could walk up to strangers and join their game. Four kids who had never met would spend an afternoon yelling directions at each other.

And then there was the narrator, voiced by Ernie Fosselius. "Warrior needs food, badly." "Elf shot the food." Every kid who played it can still do the voice, and somebody at your table always shot the food.

Playing it now

Gauntlet is still best with other people. Alone, it is a decent maze shooter. With four, it is a small drama about cooperation, greed and blame. Destroy the generators first, share the food fairly, and do not shoot it. The narrator is watching.