Gauntlet (Game)

Gauntlet is a 1985 multidirectional shooter video game developed and published by Atari Games for arcades. It is one of the first multiplayer dungeon crawl arcade games. The core design of Gauntlet comes from the 1983 game Dandy for the Atari 8-bit computers, which resulted in a threat of legal action. It also has similarities to the 1983 maze game Time Bandit. The arcade version of Gauntlet was released in October 1985, initially available only as a dedicated four-player cabinet. Atari distributed a total of 7,848 arcade units. In Japan, the game was released by Namco in February 1986. Atari later released a two-player cabinet variant in June 1986, aimed at operators who could not afford or did not have sufficient space for the four-player version.