The first arcade role-playing game.
Gauntlet's sword-and-sorcery controls (joystick, fire, magic) could accomodate up to four players: Thor the Warrior was the barbarian killing machine and deadly in hand-to-hand combat, Questor the Elf was the quickest (handy for nicking food ;), Merlin was the Wizard and made best use of the potions and Thyra the Valkyrie was an average all-rounder.
The game could display over 4.000 colours. The idea in Gauntlet is simple - loot all the treasure, kill the monsters then progress to the next level. There was no real story to Gauntlet and it is said that there's no true ending either (it apparently loops around after 999 levels).
Around this time the games companies where experimenting with ways to get more money from the player. Obviously, no arcade wanted to go back to the Pac-Man and Galaxian days of one credit lasting about 3 hours! This feature added to Gauntlet as a more-energy-per-coin scheme. It was almost impossible to get any sort of decent score with 1 credit as health decreased even if you didn't get attacked. Players would keep feeding the machine to keep playing. You could still "continue" if you died but this way kept your score and powers.
fig. 1. Gauntlet
