Do Over: Gauntlet.

When I were a lass, there used to be one of those multi-choice consoles in the local Supermacs (yes, Supermacs. I’m a proper culchie Culch.ie), to which you could theoretically feed your pocket-money in return for a cheerful selection of the games of the time. I say theoretically because, as one of the games was Super Mario 3, chances of the player exercising their right to choose were slimmer than a hipster Luigi. You’d slot your 50p in, tease a level of Mario out of it, get cocky, fall down a hole, add another 50p, and before you knew it, puberty had taken hold and you’d missed the entire summer season of Knight Rider.

But I was never one for respecting theory. I didn’t even turn up for my Leaving Cert chemistry exam. So, while I played far, far more than my fair share of Super Mario 3, I frequently flirted with the other games on offer. I liked to be seen as someone who button-bashed outside the box, someone a bit more daring than the flickering-pupiled simpletons for whom there was only one primary-coloured choice. This is how I got into playing Gauntlet, as a child. Not because I was intrigued. Not because the promo art looked so realistic. Because I was being bloody contrary.

Gauntlet was an ugly little game back then, and it’s certainly no precious retro princess now. Top-down perspective of an ugly, blocky character stalking around ugly, blocky mazes shooting uniform projectiles at swathes of drifting flea droppings does not a sumptuous work of art make. I remembered very little of the game but its theme song, so when I took up my joypad to play it as a 21^st Century gamer, I should not have been surprised to realise how bloody nondescript it was. There was, really, nothing to remember about it but its theme song. And even that was largely missing. I remember it being pleasantly simple and jingling away in the background. I wanted it as my ringtone when customisable ringtones became a dizzying possibility. And yet this time ‘round it was only noticeable for its absence. It played once over the intro screen for Gauntlet II (yes, I played both, for culture and for science), and that was it. Was it always so? Did the Gauntlet theme only loop in my childish mind, because we made our own attention spans in those days? Was this some kind of psycho-synaesthesic joke? It was a blow that the gaming session never quite recovered from.

In Gauntlet, you play as either a warrior, wizard, valkyrie or elf, and … yeah, you basically just clobber swathes of enemies as you work your way through a simple maze. Occasionally food or potions appear, which give you health points, so the game is a basic gobble/clobber combination. It also features a voiceover that’s legendary for its distorted smugness. “Remember, don’t shoot food!” the game would drawl, as your character shot endless, monotonous arrows of Pong paddles at everything that appeared on the screen. Sometimes you saw something that looked like a turkey dinner. Sometimes you saw it just as you shot the shit out of it. How were you supposed to know it was edible? It wasn’t swarming at you; that was the extent of your health and safety induction.

2004’s Fable had an annoying voiceover guy (the Guildmaster) who reminded you when you were close to croaking it, for want of turkey dinners, but by Fable II they’d done away with him, and had added a few self-flagellating references to what a pain in the earholes he’d been. An unfortunate experiment, retired when fan feedback was on the despairing end of negative? Or a nod to the gentle wheedling of Gauntlet I and II? Wizard needs health! Eat more turkey! Elf is fucked! Feed him some 50ps!

In these golden days of home consoles, I don’t have to worry about losing my disposable income to the shaky wellbeing of my turkey-starved heroes; I can only imagine how pocket-bleedingly destructive the original Gauntlet was for diehard gamers. For the home version, you only need press a button to inject your poultry-loving hero with more health; it was real money in the arcades.

This was the other legendarily infuriating thing about Gauntlet. When it was discovered to be a little too easy for seasoned nerds, it was re-released with a shit tonne of calculated stumbling blocks and intentional bugs that made it virtually impossible to clear. Gamers who had once spent a single coin on an hour’s play now could get mere minutes out of it. The coin slots were greased, the gamers exhausted. The suits had triumphed over the nerds. It was a crushing defeat for the pale and skillxord.

And that, fellow game fiends, is the most annoying thing about Gauntlet. No matter how ugly it is, how nondescript its characters, how monotonously incessant its legions of bad guys, how infuriating its well-meaning voiceover, how cynically difficult its challenges, the fucking thing is ludicrously addictive. Its bad guys are plentiful, but satisfying to fell. It’s fantastical destruction of the most soothing kind; easy to get into, difficult to master, impossible to step away from. Unless, of course, you’ve got Mario 3 on one of the other channels, a game that made a fortune without needing to punish the gamer for loving it.

Ancient game, modern rating: *** Three Stars. And each of those three was awarded for the game’s curiously compelling properties. That near obligation to clear the board of those legions of indistinguishable blobs comes from the same instinct that keeps James Dyson in business.

I played Gauntlet and Gauntlet II on Midway Arcade Treasures I and … erm, II for PS2.