THE MAKING OF GAUNTLET The Deeper Dungeons

Atari’s Gauntlet was a memorable arcade game for many reasons, but there was one feature that would have a lasting impact on the industry.

In a bid to boost takings, project leader Ed Logg engineered a four-player experience where players could feed in coins to prolong play, and crucially, new players could rock up and join a game that was already in-progress. This ‘buy-in’ feature would quickly become commonplace in multiplayer arcade games.

There was no ‘end’ to Gauntlet – the levels just kept looping after a certain point – so part of the appeal was to see how long you could survive the dungeons on a single credit. This was lost on the home versions that followed, as you could continue ad infinitum providing one player stayed alive, but these releases sowed the seeds for something that, over time, would have an ever greater impact on the wider videogame industry.

Tucked away on the inlay to US Gold’s home versions was a competition. The text read: “In early 1987, US Gold will release an expansion cassette for Gauntlet containing