I was a child of the 80′s, but back then gaming passed me by. I spent most of my time alive in that decade chewing rusks, learning the alphabet and throwing up everywhere, too busy revelling in the hedonism of preschool childhood to concern myself with the emerging gaming scene. My obsession with games wouldn’t really take off until the mid to late ’90s, just as games were starting to discover the third dimension. I fondly remember unwrapping my Voodoo 2 card, inserting it oh-so-carefully into my beige box and using it to play a dodgy PC port of Final Fantasy VII. Fast forward about ten years and here I am, a freelance games writer, more involved than ever with the ever expanding world of virtual entertainment.
But those old games still haunt me. What were these games? what were they like to play? Were they really that great? They seemed to me to be mystical tomes from whence all of modern gaming sprang. To fill in the gaps in my gaming knowledge I’ve decided to start journeying into the past. Partly to educate myself, but also to see if these games stand up to the modern gaming mind. Will these titles prove too difficult? Have modern mechanics like regenerating health bars and infinite respawns made me soft? Can the low colour pixels of the old classics stand up in the face of multimillion polygon worlds, advanced shaders and Havoc physics? There’s only one way to find out.
You don’t need the TARDIS when you have DOSbox. A must-have app that let’s you play ancient DOS games on any modern machine. If you fancy joining me on this time travelling adventure head here for a download. Most of these games are so old that they have exist today as abandonware. Google the games, they’re out there somewhere. I decided to start with Gauntlet, mostly because it was originally released as an arcade title in 1985, the year of my birth. It made its way onto our beloved Personal Computers in 1988 on DOS. Perfect.
For those unfamiliar with Gauntlet it’s a top down third person action adventure in which you take control of one of four archetypes. Warrior (close combat), Elf (speed), Valkyrie (health) and Wizard (MAGIC!). Your health is always draining as you battle through mazes containing increasingly tough enemies gobbling food to stay alive and discovering items that increase your attributes. The creep you want to avoid most is, unsurprisingly, Death, who saps your life and can only be hurt by magic attacks. It’ll take some teamwork to take him down and reach the exit.
Yes, teamwork. The DOS release only seems to have support for two players, but the original arcade cabinets allowed four friends to roll together. The explosion in co-op popularity over the last few years isn’t a new trend, it’s a resurgence. In Gauntlet you can pass each other food and get into good positions to take down the many enemies, a direct link mechanically, to awesome co-op survival horror Left 4 Dead. It’s also a good idea to get the attention of a cluster of bad guys and lure them into new position to better slaughter them, a strategy we’d recognise today, in modern MMO circles, as drawing your foe.
Gauntlet does something else cool. After level 8 it randomises its levels. Endless replayability is a profitable feature given the game’s penny arcade origins, nevertheless it’s a compelling bit of design which has featured to a more complex degree in the superb free to play roguelike Spelunky. Released only last year, Spelunky found that that giving the player a different experience with every play through lessened the frustration of constantly dying, and ensured that the game remained endlessly varied and often surprising.
In fact Spelunky, along with Passage, Sleep is Death and a number of other indie titles, are all responsible for another twist. Deliberately retrograde graphics and minimalist works like N and Canabalt are bringing the early days of gaming back to us with enough regularity to make Gauntlet’s lo-fi visuals completely playable. The ancient graphics feel familiar to the extent that they almost carry a kind of retro chic. Just as one day perms, giant shoulder pads and the New Romantics will inevitably return to eat our children, old school gaming visuals are already making a comeback. It’s not game design, it’s fashion. Gaming is old enough to start trading on the nostalgia of its origins.
The overriding impression I had as I played was surprise at the straightforward honesty of the thing. Gauntlet is naked. There’s no back story or context to any of the adventuring, no character beyond the squiggly little sprites, no reason for anything you’re doing. There’s no attempt to draw the player into the experience. There’s just a ruleset and some arenas. The golden byword of modern gaming, immersion, isn’t a factor here. You play to achieve a numerical victory. Get to level 100. Win*. Gauntlet is happy to just be a game, it has no desire to trick you into thinking you’re saving the world, or vanquishing an ancient evil, or doing anything other than scoring points. It’s an experience that’s proved refreshing and alienating in equal measure.
It’s unfair to pit Gauntlet against twenty four years of gaming progress, but I have to ask the question: is Gauntlet, by today’s standards, actually any good? No. It was fun for five minutes before the lack of a sense of purpose, character customisation and any kind of combat system beyond ‘point at bad guy and press button’ proved overwhelming and the boredom and frustration began to set in. Of all the games it reminded me of, it was memories of Diablo’s superior dungeon crawling that proved Gauntlet’s undoing. Gauntlet feels like Diablo’s Issue 1 kick-ass origin story, fun but lacking in depth or substance. It’s a good thing, a sign that games have taken these mechanics and improved upon them to the extent that the early games don’t have enough to hook the modern gaming mind. That’s not to say that Gauntlet isn’t a classic. I only wish there was a way I could go back and play it in an arcade with some friends, without any modern preconceptions and have my mind blown by the fact that oh my god the cabinet’s talking! Goddamnit, it’s Death! Help! Warrior needs food badly. WARRIOR NEEDS FOOD BADLY!
Have you played Gauntlet? Were you there vanquishing mobs in its dungeons when it first came out? Feel free to post your thoughts in the comments thread below and offer suggestions for which old game I should play next.
NB. Pics are from various shots of the arcade version as screens I grabbed of the DOSbox version came out completely garbled.
*In the original arcade version there apparently was no ending. Dying was the only way out.
I played this co-op on the xbox as part of a classics pack. It was ok but there was no mention of trying again once one of us died. And I distinctly remember being bored before that point, too. Old games like this are often best left in the past, by no means all of them but the mighty do indeed fall.
That seems to be the case with alot of classic games. Take Goldeneye for example. Dual analog is now the way to go. Its just too awkward on a single stick. As a result, although I can still get alot of enjoyment out of the game, the controls get in the way a bit.
COD 2 is another example, the multiplayer now filled with only the most dedicated players that it makes it impossible to enjoy anymore. Get together with a bunch of friends and its great though.
On the other side of the fence, I don’t enjoy the recent UT games as much as the original. Sometimes games can change too much and they lose what made the original great. I still enjoy the newest in the series but they don’t have the same feel as the original, they instead have vehicles…
I’ve played it in an arcade, but it was the updated version. I might look this up though, looks like fun.
Wow. I have so much to say. When Gauntlet came out I was an undergraduate and a college game room troll. And though I agree with your assessment of the gameplay, there were so many other dynamics involved that you need to take into account to understand the appeal and the contextual brilliance of Gauntlet.
You’d go in to the game room with a pocket full of quarters. I don’t remember exactly when quarters gave way to tokens, but the main reason was marketing. When tokens first showed up the innovation was that you would get five for a dollar instead of four. And if you got a red one you could take it up to the counter and turn it in for ten. And you had this weight and jingle in your pocket that meant you were going to be able to entertain yourself for a long time, provided you didn’t burn through it. When the jingle was gone you couldn’t play anymore. It’s easy to overlook how important it was that playing had a monetary time limit.
This had a huge influence on player choice, and thus a huge influence on how the games looked and how the gameplay was balanced. You’d try something and if it was too hard and you died too quickly, you’d never go back. That is, until you were looking over the should of someone who was good at it and you got how to do something without having to go the expensive trial and error route. And if that someone was really good, there would be a lot of people watching. Flipping that around, when you were that someone a significant part of your gratification came from having a group clustered behind you watching you be a badass. It was a different paradigm for social gaming from the current one, but it was absolutely social.
And then Gauntlet took that to a new level, because when a badass player was doing his thing, you could just jump in. The difficulty didn’t adjust for the number of players, so the more there were, the better chance you had of doing what was at the time almost unthinkable: beating the game. And by that I mean playing forever on one quarter. I was able to do it only once as a single player because I got a couple of easy levels after they started to randomize at 9, and was able to get all my upgrades before hitting any of the ghost heavy dungeons, but could do it on a regular basis when paired with a friend of mine named Tim.
I remember one time, we started at about 10:00am, and got into a real groove, with me as a wizard and him as a warrior. Then this guy jumped in as an elf and, since he was faster, started grabbing up the goodies while Tim and I were still mopping up the straggler bad guys. By intent or not, the game was designed to let us take care of the problem. We let him use one of the keys he had so brazenly stolen to pop into a room with a couple of chests and potions, but instead of following him in, as soon as the spawning started we backed up down the hallway. The effect of this was to slide map far enough over that the door went off screen. Then we just sat tight while the greedy little elf, trapped in a box, got pounded to oblivion, after which we told the guy not to waste another quarter unless he planned on changing his ways. He left mad, but he was the exception. Most people intuitively understood that cooperation worked out best for everyone.
We played until late afternoon, mostly with an audience, and handed the game over to a couple of giddy watchers who, howling and swearing at each other, had probably lost a dozen of the over two hundred extra lives we had respectively left them with before we had even got out the door. We went and bought tacos with the money we hadn’t spent over the past several hours because we were such Gauntlet badasses.
That right there is all the backstory you need.
That’s awesome! Thanks so much for posting your story, it’s a great insight into the arcade era for those of us, like me, who grew up with a gaming box in the living room and didn’t experience the same level of social gaming you’d get in a busy arcade.
By playing Gauntlet outisde of an arcade setting, I did feel as though I was missing something integral and vital to the experience so it’s really useful to hear how its mechanics worked differently with a crowd of people around the cabinet.