Why we loved immersing ourselves in Rendar's vast world of labyrinths and never wanted to leave.
As I stressed in this blog's opening mission statement: I have a pretty unorthodox way of viewing video games. I think of them as being much more than merely plastic objects that project imagery onto television screens and computer monitors. I regard them, rather, as living entities that come into your life and thereafter continue to influence it in a number of meaningful ways.
I started to feel that way back in the mid-80s, when I was a kid growing up in a more simple, more-distraction-free era. At that point in time, there was greater depth to my relationship with games. They enveloped several parts of my life. To me, they played many roles. They were about many things. They were about imagination-overloading buildup periods and thus the exciting-though-excruciatingly-long waiting times that preceded their releases. They were about the stories of our zealous and sometimes-desperate attempts to procure them. They were about the wonderful, highly impactful experiences they provided. They were about the artistic projects they inspired. And, most resonantly, they were about the relationships we formed around them--the relationships they continued to shape and influence.
Shared favorites like The Legend of Zelda, Mega Man 2, Metroid and Rygar brought us together, enriched our group culture, and literally changed our lives! That's why I saw them as more than just games.
Though, if I'm going to talk about games that brought us together and helped us to strengthen our friendship, I have to put the focus on those that did it best: our beloved multiplayer favorites--games like Balloon Fight, Ice Climber, Contra, Altered Beast, Golden Axe, Bad Dudes Vs. Dragon Ninja and Double Dragon II: The Revenge. It was these games, more than any others, that helped us to build camaraderie and form the majority of our most cherished gaming memories (the ones over which I'm always agonizing).
Among their group was today's focus: The Gauntlet series, with which we connected in multiple ways. Its games checked so many boxes and did so with such determined force that deep pen-mark impressions were left on the next several pages and even the table!
Naturally, though, my story with the Gauntlet series has an all-too-familiar opening chapter: "Prompt Dismissal."
That's how it was when I was a kid: I was too quick to conclude that certain games were unworthy of my time. If I wasn't predisposed to like a game's theme or subject-matter, I simply wouldn't give it a fair chance.
That's the way it went the first time I came across a Gauntlet machine: I took one look at the images that were being displayed on its monitor and hastily decided that I wanted nothing to do with the game to which they belonged. I knew that Gauntlet was a highly popular game, yeah, but I just didn't understand why. "I mean, what's fun about controlling vanilla-looking Dungeons & Dragons-type characters (I had an aversion to D&D in general) and trudging your way through clogged-up mazes?" I'd think to myself whenever I'd see a bunch of guys pounding away at the control panel of a Gauntlet machine.
In those early days, I didn't even so much as sample Gauntlet. I was that bored by the idea of it.
My older, more-adventurous brother, James, on the other hand, was a huge fan of Gauntlet and could always be seen playing it with two or three of his hundred-plus friends. And he'd try to get me to play it, too. Whenever his friends weren't around, he'd attempt to coax me into dropping in a quarter and joining him for some maze-traversing action. Though, because my focus was usually aimed elsewhere, I'd simply ignore his requests and run off to another section of the arcade.
I obliged once or twice, sure, but I did so while feeling completely disinterested; and so I barely paid attention to what was happening onscreen. About all I observed was that the mazes were both cramped and absolutely crowded with enemies.
I knew what I liked--what I was invariably drawn to--and it wasn't games in which tiny-sized wizards, elves and scantily clad warriors did battle with 6 million ghosts in crowded elevators. No--I was only interested in games that featured spectacular, hard-hitting and explosive action. I wanted to play those like Rolling Thunder, Rampage and Double Dragon! You know--real action games!
So I just wasn't open to the idea of fairly assessing and gaining a true understanding Gauntlet's style of gameplay. It was simply the wrong time in life. The wrong time and the wrong place.
At that point in time, there was a reason why he was able to continuously score jackpot-level scads of games. You see, dear reader: My brother and I grew up in Brooklyn, a city that was unlike any other you've ever visited. It was a borough whose neighborhoods were very tight-knit. Everyone knew everyone, and, seemingly, no one ever left. The guys and girls with whom you went to school stayed in Brooklyn post-graduation and remained in proximity to you--within the same four- or five-block distance. They'd work next to you and raised their families alongside yours. You were all one big community.
That's exactly how it was for my brother and I.
So a lot of the friends with whom James went to grammar school and high school stayed in Brooklyn and went on to run or work for local businesses. Some opened comic book shops, game stores, and other such dedicated retail outlets, and others became clerks for or managers of such places. Though, inevitably, large chains like Blockbuster Video and FuncoLand would move on in and put all of said outlets out of business.
And for James, the closing of any such store spelled big opportunity. Anytime it would happen, the friend who either owned or worked at the store would, in advance, pass word onto him that there was going to be a clearance sale, and then he or she would give him total precedence (sometimes his friends would do this as reciprocation for the financial assistance or the valuable advice my father gave them or for his generously helping them to get their businesses started). So he'd walk into the store with a $20 bill and exit with somewhere between 20 and 30 games! And that's how the greater part of my NES game-collection was formed!
That was the process by which Gauntlet found its way into my game rack.
Gauntlet made a strong impression on me well before I popped it into the NES. Or, rather, its cartridge did.
It was the strangest thing: For whatever reason, Gauntlet's cartridge was much different from standard NES cartridges. Its top portion was beveled, it lacked the iconic vertical ridges, and it was colored black instead of gray! Its design represented such a curious deviation, and I was honestly quite fascinated by the look of it.
"Since when does Nintendo allow its partners to make their own uniquely-shaped cartridges?" I wondered as I quizzically examined the cartridge's features.
It was kinda crazy, really. I hadn't seen anything like it since the 2600 days, when there was no standard format. In the current era, though, a cartridge having a different form factor was completely out of the norm! Or so I thought.
What I didn't know was that this particular version of Gauntlet was one from a handful of Tengen's unlicensed games (a crop that included two other games that James picked up during his latest binge: Road Runner and Vindicators). I couldn't have. After all: I'd never heard of an "unlicensed game." I didn't even know that there was such a thing. I simply assumed that any game or peripheral released for a console was OKed by the console's manufacturer. It had to be or else it wouldn't exist!
I was kind of an idiot, yeah.
But I just couldn't get over Gauntlet's differing form factor. I had always thought of the NES' cartridge design as being sacrosanct--as being so utterly standard--and yet here was Gauntlet boldly defying convention--defying what had forever been immutable. It was akin to committing heresy!
I didn't know what to make of all of this. I wanted to assume that the cartridge's nonconforming shape was a warning sign that I was dealing with a lesser product (because in my mind, "different" usually meant "bad"), but I refrained from doing so because I couldn't deny that there was something intriguing about the cartridge's strangely unique form and the message it was sending. I was very much interested in finding out what such a cartridge could have in store for me.
I mean, I knew what Gauntlet was going to be about, yeah, but I wasn't sure how, exactly, this strangely shaped black-cartridge version was going to present its content. "Will this version look like the arcade game?" I wondered. "Or will the presentation have some otherworldly quality to it?"
It started out great. I instantly fell in love with the game's wonderfully haunting title-screen image, which depicted ghosts and demons peeking out from behind the roughly hewn stone walls of a labyrinth whose every passage extended into an unwelcoming-looking-yet-entrancingly-mysterious black void. I examined the image for several minutes, and all the while, I drank in the amazingly wondrous atmosphere it was generating.
It wasn't a common thing for a title-screen image to immerse me in this way, no. Usually title screens, with their simple imagery and plainly rendered logos, did little for me; they almost never stirred my imagination. But Gauntlet's title screen was different. It was something special. It painted a captivating portrait of a world whose large monster-infested labyrinths were packed with endless mystery. It had the power to set my imagination into overdrive and thus transport me directly into the game's world.
"If this is how the game's world looks from a first-person perspective," I thought to myself, "then it's surely the type of place I'd love to visit!"
Then there was the title screen's other highly impactful aspect: its musical theme. It was unlike any other 8-bit tune I'd ever heard. It had the most enchantingly odd instrumentation, and its melody was all at once strangely anomalous, mysterious, and bewitching. Immediately it began to exercise its power over me, and all I could do was put the controller down and listen to it and ruminate over its message and think about the world that both it and the title-screen image were working together to characterize. It was an amazingly-otherworldly-sounding tune that could provide such richly mysterious character to any depiction it accompanied, be it a stone labyrinth or a simple ghost or flipped-open treasure chest.
And for me, it would always have the power to do that.
The weird thing was that I didn't remember seeing or hearing any of this in the original arcade game. "I must not have been paying close enough attention," I thought. (The fact was that I didn't pay enough attention. If I had paid attention, I would have remembered that the arcade version had a different title-screen image and lacked music!)
The gameplay, from what I saw in the opening minutes, was virtually identical to the arcade's: You took control of one of four hero characters (a warrior, a valkyrie, a wizard or an elf) and explored a giant maze in search of an exit. All the while, you collected treasures and potions and battled scores of ghosts, monsters and demons. And you kept your health (your "timer," in reality) up by procuring food.
"This is Gauntlet all right," I thought.
There was one major difference, though: The stages had musical themes! Each of Gauntlet's mazes had the accompaniment of a finely composed, emotionally infused tune whose job was to set a particular tone.
As I was running through the mazes, I spent most of my time listening to these tunes, each of which was, much like the title-screen theme, entrancing and mesmerizing. Each had the power to stir my imagination; whether its tone was upbeat, urgent or vexing, it would inspire me to think about Gauntlet's world and imagine a pack of adventures becoming lost in an unimaginably large labyrinth whose every branching path and every corner held potential danger.
And if the title-screen theme wasn't already amazing enough, there was an extended version that was even more stirring! It was used as a recurring stage theme. This version of the theme introduced an incredibly rousing bridge sequence that suddenly and explosively altered the piece's tone; and this complexly arranged, highly energetic strain of music served to lift the entire theme to the next level and firmly establish it as a godly piece of 8-bit music. I'd get chills every time I'd hear it play. My energy-level would shoot up, and I'd feel inspired to charge forward and absolutely plow through the hordes of enemies!
So yeah--I loved all of Gauntlet's tunes. I loved listening to them, being inspired by them, and thinking about all of the interesting stories they were telling.
However, I soon discovered that NES Gauntlet's gameplay wasn't exactly the same as the arcade's, no. It had a much different style of stage progression--one that I honestly couldn't grasp. You didn't move from one predetermined stage to the next, no, but instead from one map square to another, and you did so in a way that didn't make sense to me. Sometimes I'd move to a left square, and other times I'd move to a square placed directly above, and there didn't seem to be any rhyme or reason to why I was moving in said directions.
Gauntlet's map system was a total mystery to me. Whenever the map screen would come up, I'd have no idea what I was looking at or what any of the icons were meant to represent. "What am I supposed to be doing here?" I'd wonder. "And what the hell are all of these question marks and coins meant to indicate?"
Though, my confusion wasn't serving to damper the experience, no. Rather, it was only serving to heighten the sense of intrigue. There was so much mystery to this game, and I was eager to figure it all out. I was excited by the thought of discovering the answers to all of my questions--questions like "What other strikingly different features and mechanics does this game contain?" "What's the secret to the map system?" "Who was that evil wizard who was taunting me and going on and on about 'passwords'?" "And what's waiting for me at the end?"
I didn't have a manual handy because this was a used version of Gauntlet, and used games rarely came with manuals. In Gauntlet's case, though, I was glad that it didn't come with a manual. I preferred to solve the game's mysteries on my own.
That problem was that I wasn't able to make much progress because Gauntlet, it was turning out, was a considerably difficult game. I couldn't make it any farther than Room 15. I just kept failing. And the more I failed, the more it became clear to me that Gauntlet wasn't really designed with single-player action in mind.
So what I decided to do was recruit my friends into the effort. I figured that I'd have more success if I had the assistance of a second player. We could team up together, I thought, and beat the game and at the same time have some great multiplayer fun. And they were happy to oblige.
And it was working as I had hoped: We were capably advancing our way through Gauntlet's mazes and having a lot of fun in the process!
That's how it was going, at least, until we reached the third world. That's when we learned about the game's true nature: In NES Gauntlet, progression wasn't simply a matter of clearing successive stages, no; rather, if you wanted to advance past certain points, you had to meet very specific goals and in addition locate hidden exits. If you did this, you'd earn "letters"--parts of a secret code--and then advance forward. And if you failed to do this, you'd be forced to repeat the previous four stages--potentially in an endless loop if you didn't understand what was going on. We were quite intimidated by this discovery.
And after spending another hour or so failing to make any progress, we came to the conclusion that we simply weren't going to be able to beat this game. We didn't know how to. The process was just too arcane. So we decided that it was best give up on Gauntlet and leave it behind--as a group, at least. I, personally, was still intrigued by the game, and I still very much desired to solve its mysteries.
Over the next few weeks, I continued to grind away at Gauntlet, and, with some exhausting effort, I was able to make a bit more progress. I reached the midway point of World 3. And that's as far as I ever got.
And I knew that I'd never get any farther. I simply couldn't. The game was just too damn difficult.
This game, man. Let me tell you about this game: People like to throw around the word impossible when they talk about insanely tough 8-bit games, but when they do so, they're usually exaggerating to a pretty great extent. But let me tell you: I'm not exaggerating at all when I say as much about NES Gauntlet. This game, I swear to you, is literally impossible! It's one from a tiny minority of games that can legitimately lay claim to that label. I have no idea how anyone can be expected to beat it. (Certainly I've never come close to doing so.)
And that's exactly how I felt back in 1990. "There's no way I'm ever going to be capable enough to beat this game," I said to myself.
So I wasn't able to solve the game's mysteries. I never learned the identity of the red-cloaked demon or figured out what he wanted from me. I didn't uncover the map system's secrets. And, obviously, I never found out what was waiting for me at the game's end. I desperately wanted to discover all of the answers, yes, but it was clear that I wouldn't be able to. And I knew that continuing to pursue that goal would only bring me more pain. It just wasn't worth it.
As an aside: I returned to Gauntlet in preparation for this piece, and I have to tell you, man: After having played this game to completion (with the help of a video walkthrough, of course), I can confidently say that Nintendo would have rejected it even if Tengen had gone through the proper channels. Hell--considering how broken the game is, I'm shocked that it even got an official release! We're talking about a game that's so maliciously designed that a few of its end-world stages have exits that send you not back to the first world but instead directly back to the game's title screen! The first time this happened to me, I thought that I'd encountered a bug or a glitch, but after looking into the matter, I became aware of the fact that this was an intentional design decision! And all I could think was "What kind of sadistic freaks was Tengen employing back then?"
I mean, you just know that an NES game is unfathomably difficult when even the incredibly thorough Video Game Museum doesn't have images of its ending!
But even though things had unfortunately gone south with Gauntlet, our maze-exploring days weren't quite over yet.
Right around that time, you see, James went on another one of his game-buying binges, and this latest blitz netted him another 10-15 games. And wouldn't you know it: One of those games happened to be the recently released Gauntlet II!
While I was very happy with this development, I was kinda disappointed by what I saw when I removed the game from its box: The cartridge's designer had chosen to ditch the the black-colored, beveled look in favor of the traditional gray-brick design! To me, a Gauntlet game's adopting this form factor seemed like a regression of sorts. It was as if the game was sacrificing its mystique and doing so because it desired to conform (I was still unaware of the whole "unlicensed games" situation, so my conclusion was that Tengen had changed the form factor because it had decided to cave in to consumers who had "rejected its games because they disliked the cartridges' unorthodox design").
My friend Dominick was over at my house that day, and we decided that it made the most sense for us to focus our attention on the new batch's multiplayer games. Our first choice was Gauntlet II. And it was our only choice because we wound up spending the rest of the day with it!
In the opening few minutes, I had mixed impressions. I was happy that its title screen had the accompaniment of the classic Gauntlet theme, yeah, but I didn't feel as though this rendition measured up to the original; it just didn't have the same energy or the same spellbinding qualities (and, most disappointingly, there was no extended version of this theme!). Also, I wasn't thrilled with the game's complete lack of stage music. "Without music, there's no flavor these environments!" I thought to myself.
On the other hand, I was very much impressed with the game's far-better-than-usual voice samples. At the time, I didn't think that an NES game could capably produce voice samples that were that clean- and crisp-sounding, nor did I think that an NES pak could hold so many voice samples. But here was Gauntlet II eagerly exhibiting the most real-sounding voicework we'd ever heard in an 8-bit game! We never expected such a thing.
Indeed Gauntlet II had a number of surprises for us.
What we enjoyed most, though, were those voice samples. We got such a kick out of the narrator's frequent announcements pertaining to character arrivals, changes in status, warnings of impending death, and how we indeed, for the thousandth time, shot the food! We just couldn't get enough of the narrator and his utterances. We loved every single one of them. And we were keen to trigger them as often as possible.
What was so great about them was that they made us laugh and furthermore inspired some of the silliest banter we ever shared. It was always hilarious to me how exasperated the narrator would sound whenever he was announcing that one of us shot a potion. "Green warrior just shot the potion!" he'd say in the most bewildered-sounding tone, as if he were personally offended by our idiocy.
My friends and I had a lot of fun trying to break the narrator's spirit (or, rather, his programming) by rapidly trading "It" status and laughing at his futile effort to keep up with the exchanges ("Red valkyrie is... Blue wizard is... Red valkyrie is.. Blue wiz... Red v... R-Blue... Blu-vur... Vurpblurp..."). And we were particularly fond of mimicking the characters' wailing utterances (even though we considered them to be the game's most annoying sounds). In Gauntlet, the heroes would express pain with muted grunts, but in this game, they'd instead let out these high-pitched, ear-piercing shrieks. "OWHOARH!" they'd howl as if they were receiving surprise enemas from Edward Scissorhands. And we'd make sure to repeat this annoying sound to each other constantly!
We'd repeat all of the game's sounds, really, and we'd do so even when we weren't playing the game--when we were hanging out at the park, in the bowling alley, or in one of our kitchens. Mimicking its characters was one of our favorite pastimes. We loved doing it.
Oh, the fun we had with Gauntlet II's voice samples.
Whenever we'd play Gauntlet II, I'd gravitate toward the Elf (just like I'd do in the original Gauntlet) because I believed that speed-type characters were highly preferable to lumbering strength-type characters in games in which you were under time constraints. Also, I could relate to speedy, hyperactive characters because I was one of them! (In fact, while I'm writing this piece, I'm also rapidly doing the Ed Grimley dance to the Diddy Kong Racing character-select tune. Please send someone to stop me. Thanks!)
Though, time constraints weren't as big an issue in Gauntlet II (at least in multiplayer mode) because its developers thankfully remedied one of Gauntlet's major flaws: the lack of continues. In Gauntlet II, you could continue an infinite number of times (except in the rare instances in which all players died at the exact same time) and thus continue playing and enjoying the game as long as you desired to! And, really, that's all we wanted. We loved the Gauntlet series' style of gameplay--the fast and frenzied cooperative maze-exploration that allowed for us to exuberantly work together to survive chaos and find the solutions to tricky puzzles--and were desperately seeking a version of Gauntlet that didn't try to restrain our enjoyment of it.
And Gauntlet II gave us exactly what we were looking for. And because it did, we couldn't stop playing it! Any time we'd get together, we'd play it for hours at a time in long marathon sessions that usually took up the entirety of our nighttime gaming sessions.
But Gauntlet II's having infinite continues didn't serve to make it an "easy" game, no. We still died a lot, we still had trouble solving some of its more arcane-feeling puzzles, and we still struggled to make steady progression. Gauntlet II's campaign was endless, so our winning condition was making it farther into the game than we did in our previous attempt. That's what we'd attempt to do each time we played the game. In the end, though, we were never able to advance past the early-50s stages.
We never felt disappointment when we failed, though, because, really, there was no reason to. How far we made it wasn't really important. It wasn't the point. What mattered most, we all knew, was that we had a great time playing one of our favorite multiplayer games and that we enjoyed sharing in the camaraderie--camaraderie that Gauntlet II absolutely helped to bolster.
That was the true value of Gauntlet II.
When I look back on our time with Gauntlet II and think about the things we most enjoyed about the experience, it's always the funny little moments that come to mind. I remember how we could never get the transporters to send us where we wanted to go, but we'd still act as though we understood how to manipulate them anyway ("Will you just input the correct command and get over here already!" one of us would bark at the other after successfully transporting, as if flaunting his "mastery" of the transporting process). I recall how we'd freak out at the sight of a free-roaming pack of Deaths and then frantically attempt to evade them; we'd invariably screw up, of course, and get pinned against a wall, and in trying to escape, we'd keep inadvertently pushing each other into the arms of the entire pack and effectively helping them to sap all of our life.
I always think of those times when one of us would accidentally shoot a food item that the other desperately needed and was currently rushing toward. "Woops!" the food assassin would likely say, apologetically, even though he knew that such a sentiment would be of no real consolation to his slightly pissed and soon-to-be-dead compadre. And then the shooter would of course clean out his ally's corpse and take all of his dropped keys. You know--for reasons.
And I can't forget our very first encounter with a dragon and how we excitedly accosted and slayed it and thus earned the narrator's words of praise. "I've not seen such bravery!" he told us after we heroically brought down the nasty fire-spewing behemoth. Then, naturally, we accidentally shot the reward and subsequently walked into the residual flames and thus earned a campaign-terminating Game Over.
To us, that was the Gauntlet II experience: No matter how well you worked together, things would inevitably take a turn for the disastrous! And, really, that was the fun of Gauntlet II. There was always great enjoyment to be had in trying to endure all of the madness while at the same time doing your best not to screw over your ally, even if such efforts would ultimately prove to be futile. That was exactly the kind of action we were looking for in our multiplayer games.
So yeah--we absolutely loved Gauntlet II. It was, much like the previously chronicled Double Dragon II: The Revenge, a highly realized sequel--one that remedied all of its predecessor's mistakes--and one of the most utterly replayable games we'd ever played. It was one of the best cures to our fits of boredom. If we had an hour to kill before we'd be ready to head over to the theater to see the latest Schwarzenegger flick, then the simple answer was to fill it with some Gauntlet II action. If it was too rainy to head over to Dyker Park, then the clear alternative was to play Gauntlet II for a good three or four hours. If it was another one of those boring summer nights in which nothing good was playing on TV, then, well, it made the most sense to instead drain away the night hours frantically exploring Gauntlet II's deviously designed mazes and doing so until our senses were too dulled to continue on!
Gauntlet II could reliably provide us lively, joyous fun whenever we needed it most. And because it could, we loved it. It was one of our all-time favorite multiplayer games and one of our favorite games in general. And it remained as such for the following half-decade, right up until the point when, sadly, we all started to go our separate ways.
Oh, if only those days could have lasted just a little bit longer.
About a year after Gauntlet II arrived in my home, I finally came across the arcade version in one of our local arcades. And my most surprising discovery was that it was identical to the NES version (save for its having superior graphical fidelity)--or, rather, that the NES version didn't take any liberties with its inspiration, as most NES ports were apt to do (a good example is, well, Gauntlet, which, as we know, is aggressively divergent).
I only spent a few minutes with Gauntlet II that day, but in that short span of time, I was able to get a strong sense of what the genuine arcade-Gauntlet experience was like. That's when I came to deeply regret my error in not playing arcade Gauntlet with James--in not standing by his side in the liveliest of gaming environments and allowing myself to have a great time in helping him to fight through swarms of foes, obtain treasure, solve complexly designed puzzles, and somehow endure all of the madness! Had I been open to the experience, I surely would have had a lot of fun. Sadly, though, I missed the opportunity.
If only I could go back in time and kick myself.
What was great about the Gauntlet games was that you could have fun with them even in short bursts. You could spend 15 minutes playing through 8-10 mazes and in that time become consumed with the very same feelings of excitement and joy that you'd experience if you instead spent two hours playing through 50-plus mazes. You didn't have to beat these games, or come close to doing so, in order to have an amazing time with them. That's what made them so special.
And also, appropriately and quite memorably, the Gauntlet games were always able to make us run through the gamut of emotions. In every single one of our Gauntlet experiences, we'd become increasingly annoyed at each other's propensity to want to scroll the screen in a different direction--in a direction that would leave an already-besieged party in an even worse position (usually trapped in a corner and surrounded by hordes of enemies). We'd feel desperation as we attempted to get around each other and rush forward as we were being chased by a pack of Deaths ("GO! JUST GO!" we'd shout in terror). We'd feel anxiety as our health was continuing to tick down and we just couldn't find the maze's exit even though we seemingly exhausted every possibility. As mentioned, we'd take turns getting pissed at each other for shooting food items when they were desperately needed. And we'd feel great joy any time we were able to put together a good run and advance farther than we did in any of our previous attempts.
It was all part of the fun.
These days, unfortunately, Gauntlet and Gauntlet II are included on the long list of games that I haven't played much since I was a kid. I've attempted to get back into them, sure, but I just can't. Each time I try, my mood immediately dampens because I'm quick to sense that something very important is missing: good friends by my side. Without them, it's just not the same, and the absence of lively, banter-filled multiplayer action only serves to make the Gauntlet experience feel sedated and emotionally empty. And thus it's never long before my thoughts confirm that the old magic has since faded. The old days are long gone.
But even then, I still find that it's worth my time to occasionally load up the original Gauntlet if only for the purpose of drinking in its unforgettable title screen, whose wonderfully evocative musical theme and imagination-stirring depictions will always be the best accompaniment to the moments in which I reminisce about those old days and all of the fun times my friends and I had.
So, as you can see, the Gauntlet games are very much living entities. They're functioning organisms that are always there, somewhere, communicating to me that all of my gaming memories are worth cherishing. They're there to remind me of the best parts of my childhood and what made each of them so special. And their presence will continue to be felt. They'll continue to live on, if not on my TV screen or computer monitor then certainly in my heart.
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