Gauntlet

"Red warrior needs food badly." That digitized voice is known to anyone who ever stood at the cabinet of Gauntlet – an arcade legend by Atari Games from the mid-1980s that practically invented the genre of the cooperative dungeon crawler as we know it.

Gauntlet let up to four people play at once, each in their own role: the Warrior with powerful melee combat, the Valkyrie with balanced defense, the Wizard with devastating magic and the Elf with speed and ranged fire. This quartet hacked its way through endless mazes full of ghosts, demons, throwers and enemy generators. The top-down view and constant onslaught of adversaries created a chaotic but incredibly gripping dynamic.

The brilliant design move was in the health economy. Your life constantly and slowly drained away simply through the passage of time – so you had to collect food and keep moving forward, never stopping. This slyly pushed players toward action while at the same time pumping coins into the machine, because refilling your energy was done precisely by adding another credit. Cooperation was also key: with four of you, you survived, but selfishly collecting treasure and food led to unforgettable arguments at the cabinet.

The cabinet, with its characteristic controls and the digitized voice of the dungeon master who commented on events and mercilessly announced dwindling health, became cult. The line about the hungry red warrior passed into gaming's folkloric memory. Gauntlet showed that the arcade could be a place of genuine team action among strangers.

Gauntlet's influence is enormous. It inspired a whole line of later cooperative action games and itself received many sequels and ports to all sorts of home systems. The principle of four players advancing together through a maze against waves of enemies still resonates in modern action and roguelite titles. As one of the first proper multiplayer experiences in arcades, it deserves its place of honor in history.

Why play: The true root of cooperative dungeon crawlers – with four friends Gauntlet is, even after decades, chaotic, addictive fun full of laughter and arguments over food.