Gauntlet II
Hyper Spooky Game #4
Type of game
An endless series of mazes, one after another, and then... you're dead.
Release date on our machines
1988 for the Atari ST version. As for the exact month, um... let's say July, just like that.
Developer
Atari Games Corporation, the arcade division of Atari, no longer exists today.
Publisher
U.S. Gold Ltd., acquired by Eidos in 1996, then by Square Enix in 2009.
Gauntlet II: Not available anywhere! Maybe you can find it at the bottom of a chest, well hidden in a maze infested with terrifying creatures.
When I think back, days must have lasted about forty hours in the early nineties. At Randall Geyser's house, my best friend from elementary school, we had time to play war with his G.I. Joe figures in his garden, play war with his G.I. Joe figures in his bedroom, have three snacks, clog his toilet by throwing carrots down into it, and ON TOP OF THAT, try out twenty different games on his Atari STE. Among them, undoubtedly our favorite (I'm including Golden Axe in the Mega Drive games to avoid conflict): Gauntlet II, which accompanied (and terrified) us until the advent of more modern computers. Of course we had time to play it. We'd die in five minutes, or we'd be so scared that we'd pull the disk out of the drive with our teeth (the second part of that sentence is completely false, editor's note). So why did his parents store their carrot bin in the toilet? I absolutely must solve this mystery one day.
War, carrots and video games
Isogendered view
Despite exploiting a concept that could be described as basic, Gauntlet II is nonetheless carried by its devilishly effective production and playability. Okay, I'll stop pretending to be a writer who thinks he's a good writer. Yeah, because “nonetheless carried” is poorly written. Except that, well, it's still true and impossible to contradict. The controls are flawless, and the graphics are superb... well, maybe not superb. But it's acceptable for 1988, at least for an arcade port. You play as a valiant fighter, or fighteress seen from above, from a slightly isometric perspective. Ha! How many have I lost with the word fighteress? Come on, bonne riddance, or good débarras, whatever. I don't know if I've cherished the isometric view so much since I got to know Gauntlet II, or if it took me afterwards. Let's just say it contributed to my neurosis on the subject. This barbarian, mage, valkyrie, or elf shoots at hordes of monsters through increasingly bizarre levels, increasingly overrun with colorful evil creatures.
Note that the elf does not represent an individual but a profession, just like in Warriors of the Eternal Sun, Tower of Doom, and more generally the old Dungeons & Dragons rules. So much for the concern for minority inclusion, eh... it's nothing new. In fact, everyone in the game is white, even the elf. I mentioned shooting earlier, because yes, all the heroes attack from a distance. The gameplay isn't necessarily very complicated, but it's extremely effective. Well, it suited us, especially since melee combat in this game would have made it a lot harder. We chose characters based on our mood at the time, without even knowing if there was a difference in their stats (I still don't know, unlike in Gauntlet IV). To move on to the next stage, you have to brave tons of creatures while wandering through often tortuous corridors. Well, wandering... we mostly ran as fast as we could, without really knowing why.
A sense of urgency gripped us, but neither Randall nor I could explain it. Was it our health bar steadily decreasing, even though we weren't being eaten by a monster? Maybe. Sometimes we had to find keys to open blocked passages, and we frequently ran into rows of invisible walls that drove us crazy. And when we thought we'd finally found the exit, there was a 50/50 chance it would be a fake! All that for what? To relive the same ordeal on the next level, but with teleporters thrown in? And magical walls that damage us? Come on! Sign me up for thirty years! The enemies come in all shapes and sizes, from big prehistoric men armed with clubs to fire-breathing red demons, and gnomes throwing water bombs filled with acid. We collect so much treasure that we don't know where to store it all.
But who cares? Thousands of gold coins have never taken up space in any video game, except for Diablo, which tried too hard to be realistic. The ideal outfit for any self-respecting tomb raider. Because that's what we do, right? Raid tombs, invade caves, piss off the local wildlife. Who knows, maybe we're trampling all over Natura 2000 areas with our big boots. No wonder the monsters want to eat us, actually. We even steal their roast chickens to regain some strength! Well, they shouldn't have left them lying around. And besides, we had to lower our stress levels by increasing our health points. There are limits to respect.
Deaths, allegories of... Well, death
Gauntlet II rhymes with pure heroic fantasy through and through! But 1980s heroic fantasy, mind you. Big brutes in Golden Axe mode; two men and two women, if you count the elf as a woman. There you go, I've won back everyone I lost with my fighteress writing earlier. Magic that slaughters hundreds of creatures per minute, without the slightest need for psychological follow-up! When you're seven or eight years old, you don't care about the storyline, or the possible risks of post-traumatic stress that plague the barbarians you send into battle. Luckily, we're not offered any of either. Well, we were a little scared anyway, especially of the monsters we called The Deaths. Very scared, in fact. Black specters, almost invincible and as fast as our avatars, floating towards us with their arms outstretched to suck out our life force. Enough to give us nightmares until we came of age. And then, when we came across a dragon (which took up eight squares instead of just one like all the other enemies), we died just as much in the game as in real life.
That's where that feeling of frenzy came from, the terror of encountering Death itself. Oh, and as our health points were constantly dropping, we imagined an internal countdown that would make our hearts burst when it reached zero. Okay, I know we're all going to die someday, but dying every two minutes of old age? That's a bit extreme as a view of life.
it lacks accompaniment
​Well, I don't have much to say about the soundtrack, since there isn't one. Barely thirty seconds of intro music, and nothing else! It's a shame, because it could have added a touch of epicness and danger, making this game even more legendary. At least in Gauntlet IV on Mega Drive, we got some decent music. Anyway, there are always the sound effects, which aren't great on Atari ST, but are still pretty cool in their ability to destroy our eardrums. Especially the awful screech of a Death when it hits a player. Seriously! What is that sound of a quartz fork scraping against a rusty titanium plate? That one does more damage than all the others combined, both to our ears and our sanity, calling into question our very presence in the physical world.
And the latch will DIE
A big plus point for Gauntlet II is that two players can battle it out as a team on the same screen. The Atari ST even allowed three or four players to play, just like in the arcade, which no other home machine could do. But we never tested it, as you had to connect two other joysticks via an adapter sold separately. Who could boast of having four joysticks at home without feeling ashamed? For reasons that still escape me today, as long as we didn't die at the same second, our fighter would respawn endlessly. Given the constantly increasing difficulty throughout the game, the developers had a good idea in adding this feature. It made single-player mode completely unfair, but hey, we only played togehter, with Randall, so... We almost looked forward to that inevitable moment when one of us died, because it displayed a sentence in English that took up the entire screen: “Conjuring a Character”. We pronounced it in French, as if “character” were a first-group verb and our character was called “Conjuring” (so everyone had the same name in there, which was handy).
We had no idea what it meant, but it was the same feeling we got when we read “and the bobbin will spin” in Little Red Riding Hood, so we figured it was normal anyway. And we looked at each other, repeating the phrase with a tight smile, trying to look calm, when in fact we were scared to death. Because of the Deaths, of course. The ultimate nemesis! Damn it! Now, let's take three seconds to imagine our distress when one day, we landed in a level FILLED ONLY WITH DEATHS !!! We screamed, unplugged the computer, and cut the power to the whole house immediately.
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