Wizard Needs Food, Badly.
Like any kid in the ‘80s, I found video arcades attractive. Loud, crowded, smelly, yes, but full of complicated, engaging games. I never got entirely sucked in, however, because I was also cheap. I preferred my quarters in my pocket, where they belonged. Often, it was enough just to watch, if I could find someone who knew what he was doing, playing something good. Most games weren’t much fun to watch, because most games depended more on reaction speed than on strategy: mash the fire button as fast as you can, and zip around too fast for the bad guys to touch you. But a few games were slower, more cerebral, requiring you to plan ahead and work efficiently. Rampart, wherein you built defensible castles from random blocks between assaults, was one. Many of the descendants of PacMan were strategic, allowing you to draw the bad guys into various kinds of traps. The champion of games that I watched but never played, however, was Gauntlet.
Gauntlet was a shameless quarter-sucker, which is why I never started with it. It was one of the earliest games to adopt the technique of allowing you to continue play after losing instead of starting over, just as long as you kept feeding it quarters. Pay enough money, and you could make it all the way to the end, no matter how lousy you were. In fact, Gauntlet employed powerups to encourage kids to cough up a token before they even knew it would be necessary. If you paid your token after dying, you returned at base strength to a situation dangerous enough to kill you when you had damage reducers and weapon multipliers. Safer to pay the token first. Reaching this point was inevitable because life slowly drained away with time, even if nothing ever touched you. In theory, small health bonuses in game could offset the time drain if you could advance quickly enough, but I never saw anyone’s health going up. Never. A brilliant scheme to get as many quarters as possible per unit time.
That was too bad, because it had a game design to match its brilliant payment design. Taking its cue from Dungeons & Dragons, Gauntlet had players wandering a top-down view of a dungeon-like maze filled with monsters. It was one of the first games to give you a choice of figures with different abilities; you could take the slow but hard-hitting warrior, the speedy archer, the armored Valkyrie, or the wizard, and your choice would affect your ability to execute various tactics. Much of the game depended on luring your many enemies into choke points where you could kill them one at a time. But you also had to go on the offensive in order to take out the tiles that would otherwise continue to generate monsters while the clock, and thus your life, ticked away. You had to use the terrain as a shield, as well as circumvent it as a barrier. You had to plan your approach to different locations and decide when to push past extra obstacles to a different exit, allowing you to leapfrog several levels at once. Two players together didn’t just double their firepower; they could choose which hero to use for a given job, and even employ two-person tactics, like using one player to draw the monsters’ attention from behind a wall, close but safe, while the other destroyed their generator from long range. It was a thinking man’s video game, and I wanted to play it, just not at the cost of 25¢ every few minutes.
I got a taste of it recently in a demo, when Eileene borrowed Stan’s Xbox360. It was fun, despite the ancient graphics and voice simulation. (“Wizzlud nbleeds foorld, brladly.”) I remember Gauntlet getting ported to a console many years ago, and players snubbing it for allowing you to continue play by pressing the fire key in place of the arcade parlor’s token. They had a point; as I noted above, with enough quarters, you could win by brute force, and the home version effectively handed out an infinite supply of quarters. Victory is meaningless.
As exploration, however, “Press any button to continue” works just fine. It’s a lost opportunity returned. As long as I have he self-discipline not to abuse the system with kamikaze charges, it lets me go in and explore all the interesting situations I passed up so many years ago out of parsimony.
Or it would, if I were willing to pay the subscription fee to unlock the whole game.