Gauntlet II

I remember the first time I saw Gauntlet in the arcade hall at the shopping center — four players hammering buttons simultaneously, the screen crawling with enemies, and the speaker blaring "Elf needs food badly." At home on my PC, I had only one joystick and far fewer enemies, but this game still captivated me for the whole afternoon.

Gauntlet II from 1989 is Atari's direct sequel to the arcade hit, and the formula stayed virtually unchanged. Top-down dungeon hack, four character types — warrior, elf, wizard, sorceress — and a hundred levels packed with monsters, ghosts, and traps. The goal is simple: get out of each room alive, collect food, keys and treasure, and treat invincibility as a temporary advantage, not a survival guarantee.

The mechanics are brutally straightforward. Movement, shooting, occasional special actions. Monsters spawn from generators that you must destroy before they overwhelm you — that applied in 1985 and still does here. Compared to the first game, there's a bit more variety in enemies and environments, but no revolution happening. PC controls were a compromise back then: the keyboard was never quite right for this type of game, and without four players at one computer, the game loses a real chunk of its soul. Solo is manageable, but in an arcade hall full of people, it was a completely different beast.

We remember Gauntlet II mainly because it taught us that sequels don't need to reinvent the wheel. Just add some more enemies, a few more levels, and sell it to those who loved the first one. Atari pulled it off exactly a year after the original, which itself says plenty about how successful the first game was. Today the game looks like what it always was — a straightforward arcade designed for quarters, not hundreds of hours at the monitor. It's aged without major surprises: graphics are of their era, sound functional, depth virtually zero.

Who should play it today? Mainly those who want to feel what multiplayer gaming looked like before that word even existed in gaming vocabulary. Or simply those who love dungeons where thinking isn't mandatory. Fire it up in your browser, blast through a few levels, reminisce about arcades with cigarette smoke hanging from the ceiling — and then admit to yourself that Diablo took the whole thing much further.