Exits. Let’s talk about them! An overview of what we’re looking at is necessary before we make our way there, though. Gauntlet is another arcade conversion, like Paperboy of an American original by Atari. It’s also our most definitive meeting so far with Dungeons & Dragons. Gauntlet was heavily based on a more explicitly D&D game called Dandy – D an’ D’, get it? – and the references are clear, if mostly aesthetic.You pick your warrior/elf/valkyrie/wizard/ and set about going through some 2D dungeons from a top-down view, fighting past packed hordes of ghosts, goblins, and probably at some point dragons.
The role-playing does manifest a bit more deeply in the form of slightly different attributes for different characters and in giving you one single large count of thousands health points to wear down, or build up by collecting the food strewn about the place. This approach lends each attempt at Gauntlet a certain long-term strategy missing from most lives-based games. The arcade version was also early to the idea of having four people playing at once, each taking on one of the four characters and giving it that adventuring party feel. It gave players the choice to co-operate or to hinder each other, shooting food before other players can get to it. A surprising amount of the game, including that aspect, remains intact on the Spectrum version, even as it brings the number of possible players down to two.
Now, exits. There are a lot of different exits in games, from the ways out of each room (and into another) in Jet Set Willy or Fairlight or countless others, to the exits at the end of each level of Uridium or Thrust. Those exits are both softer, in that your ship is shown as leaving the bounds of a particular locality but both boundary and the connection to a destination are less obvious, and harder in that they irreversible. Exits can sometimes be intricately tied up with goals, the things you need to achieve to move on. The finish line in each race in Daley Thompson’s Decathlon, the point of leaving the event, is a goal and an exit of sorts.
Gauntlet elevates the exit above any of those. The exits in Gauntlet are notable for being squares with ‘Exit’ written on them, slashing through of any idea of symbolism or of representing a place. The name and the thing it names become one and the same thing. Exit means exit. It shows a bold reliance on conceptual power, which turns out to be rather deserved. Nothing else needs to be achieved in each of Gauntlet’s dungeon level but to find and get to the exit.
Sometimes it won’t be obvious where the exit is. Sometimes it will be tantalisingly placed beyond a locked door that you must find a key for. But it always ends in the same way. Because there are so many enemies and enemy-generating factories around, running away where possible is frequently a good strategy. So there you will be, being chased by a screen-filling army of the hostile, when you locate and reach the exit square, and all the problems vanish out of consideration in an instant. You will have a new level to contend with soon, but in that moment this one is gone completely. No one follows you through the exit. Consequences are erased.
And so, making an exit becomes the sole motivating force. At the exit your character spins around in celebration, reinforcing the achievement, but it’s the conceptual force of getting there which is the thing. The level ending is more powerful than a chapter ending or the end credits rolling on a TV episode, and the exit becomes a narrative force that reaches back to alter what happens within. Amongst all the other fantasy ideas Gauntlet is operating with, it’s the fantasy of the clean break that’s most powerful. Even in Gauntlet, though, it’s clearly just fantasy. None of the ghouls follow you through, but your health counter stays with you. The interactions you already had aren’t shut out when you pass through the exit. You can’t go back and change the past, but its effects linger and must be reckoned with. To exit won’t fix everything.
