Gauntlet

Development

• Atari arcade programmer Ed Logg wanted to do a Dungeons&Dragons arcade game because his son was a D&D fan. Logg didn't know how to take D&D into an arcade game format, until he was inspired by the game Dandy on Atari 800.
• Tony Porter and Kevin Bulmer - programmer and graphic artist of Spectrum, Amstrad, MSX and Master System conversions - had no support from Atari at coding level. No source code was presented until they had completed the games. They worked everything out by playing the arcade version which they had in the office and could play for free.

1001 Video Games

The Arcade version of Gauntlet appears in the book 1001 Video Games You Must Play Before You Die by General Editor Tony Mott.

DOS version

The DOS version uses a tweaked 256x200 pixel graphics mode and some other graphics trickery in EGA. Many VGA (and later) cards do not support this properly causing the game to hang after the character selection screen. DOSBox (starting at version 0.73) includes proper EGA emulation that allow this game to run when configured with the "machine=ega" option.

PCjr

There is an interesting note in the documentation for PCjr users:

Note to Pcjr users: If you wish to run the program in 16-color mode, the line DEVICE=PCJRMEM.COM present in the config.sys file on your boot disk must be changed to read DEVICE=PCJRMEM.COM /C instead.

This gives a clue as to how to get other Tandy 1000 graphic-mode games running on a PCjr (ironic, since the Tandy is a clone of the PCjr).

Awards

• Commodore Format
  • March 1991 (Issue 6) - listed in the A to Z of Classic Games article (Great)
• Game Informer
  • August 2001(Issue #100) - #64 in the "Top 100 Games of All Time" poll

Information also contributed by PCGamer77 and Steven Don