Gauntlet Legends

Gauntlet Legends builds on the famous arcade series from the mid-80s and carries over its recipe — up to four players at once, a quartet of heroic archetypes (warrior, wizard, elf and dwarf), and mazes full of monsters pouring out of generators — into a fully 3D form. Compared to the original entries, it adds a clear system of experience levels that automatically carries players forward between visits and unlocks new weapons and spells, so the game works as a kind of arcade version of gradual character progression, where progress isn't lost even after the last coin is spent and the arcade session at the machine ends.

As an arcade machine, Legends was built to encourage feeding it coins, and its pace reflects that: the character steadily loses health over time, and the only way to survive is to gather food and treasure along the way or pay for a continue. The mazes are full of secret passages, teleporters and monster generators that need to be destroyed before they flood the whole room, and navigating three-dimensional space was a novelty compared to its two-dimensional predecessors, one that players had to get used to. Cooperation between up to four players at one machine, with characters of different abilities — where the elf shoots fast at range and the dwarf has the strongest close-up attacks — made Legends one of the last truly social arcade experiences before home consoles became developers' main target and a hall full of strangers to play with started giving way to gaming from the couch. The audio, with a narrator's voice continuously commenting on collected items and approaching danger, became one of the series' recognizable trademarks, and Legends introduced it in exactly the form later home ports would also be remembered for.

Why play it: The arcade version is the original one, where the philosophy of coin-fed survival and four-player cooperation, as designed by Atari Games, is best seen, before the series moved to home consoles and the whole game's pace and motivation changed along with it.