Although Atari’s coin-op division remained profitable throughout the US videogame crash of 1983, there were lay-offs from the department, and this resulted in a fantasy RPG-style arcade game that Ed Logg had started designing late in the year being put on the backburner. By the time Ed had the staff he required it was early 1985, and soon after, coder Bob Flanagan replaced an Atari legend on Ed’s team. “I got on to the project about three months in,” Bob recalls. “Dave Theurer had been doing the work with Ed and then I took over. Dave had built the level editor, and I think some of the initial mazes. Then my job was to maintain the editor and extend it, and also create mazes and do other coding.”
Naturally, Bob assessed the work that had been done before his arrival. The inspiration for its theme and heroes were obvious to him, and some earlier coin-ops came to mind as he analysed its gameplay. “Gauntlet was based on Dungeons & Dragons-type games, and all the characters were based on typical D&Dtype characters,” Bob observes. “It reminded me a little of Berzerk and Frenzy, with a bit of Robotron but much less high-adrenaline. Pat McCarthy had done the hardware, and he came up with the brilliant idea of how to have so many objects on the screen at the same time. That was instrumental in being able to accomplish what Ed wanted, which was a screen just swarming with characters.”
Work on was far from over, however, as Ed had a highly ambitious target for the number of levels he wanted for the game. Bob was instrumental in this effort, but he got help from colleagues in Atari’s coin-op division. “We wanted over 100 levels, and we needed a prime number because we wanted the game to cycle through the mazes in different orders,” Bobup on a machine outside so that people in the division could make their own mazes.”
