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.


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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.