Gauntlet - Atari ST [002] Shortplay PlayThru Levels 1-26

Title Screen

NOTE: A trainer was used for making this capture.

Gauntlet is a port of the Atari Games 1985 arcade title, which was ported to many other systems.

I remember when Gauntlet was new, and a local Time Out arcade had the cabinet.  Similar to Street Fighter 2 a few years later, people were lined up to feed quarters into the machine, to get their 2000 health.  Back then, the Wizard was not very popular, since you could only have 1 of each class in the original game, so typically that controller on the arcade cabinet was empty.

Gameplay

This is one of the first games I was able to experience on the Atari ST.  Mindscape released it along with that Atari XL/XE port.  I could not run that Atari XL/XE port on the Atari 800 we had, even though it had a ram expansion; it was not the right kind of RAM< so only 48k would be seen by the game instead of the 64k the game required.  As such, I was happy to get the Atari ST version!

Treasure Room

Box Cover

The graphical presentation looks nice, although the colors do seem a little washed out.  The game plays OK, except it does suffer from a lot of slowdown.  This release is only 2 players, and since joysticks only support one fire button, to use a potion, a key needs to be pressed on the keyboard.  None of the digitized voices are included, and other than the title screen, there is no between level music, or even the level card from the arcade that was used.  There is no background music even in the treasure room levels.

I guess to sum this up, the programmers on the Atari learned a lot between making Gauntlet, and Gauntlet 2 (or, as some say, Gauntlet 2.0) because that port on the ST came much closer to the arcade.  Still, for an early at home release, the game does look nice.  First time playing Gauntlet vs. Gauntlet 2?  I would go with Gauntlet 2.

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Capture info -

This gameplay was captured on February 14, 2018.

Game was played on an Atari 1040 STf, TOS 1.4, 1MB, equipped with a CosmosEX from Jookie.
A Best Electronics ST Monitor to VGA cable was used, connected to an OSSC 1.6 (processing the video in Line4x mode), with the output being captured by a Startech USB3HDCAP.

Video was edited with Shotcut.