Welcome To Project 1985 • #UR00323

Welcome to Project 1985. I have been dreaming about this fun project for a number of years. Before I go into all the gory technical details, I need to take you back in time to the year 1985…

"An 80's style Pizza Arcade. Photo: Kelsey Lawson"

Imagine you just walked into your local pizza arcade. While your eyes adjust to the darkness you are hit with the tantalizing aroma of fresh pizza and stale beer. The pepporoni bubbles and glistens while a young employee rocks an enormous dull knife across the pie on the counter. Names crackle over the rudimentary PA system as kids run up to the register to pick up their food and drinks.

Around the corner you can hear the clatter of tokens as they spill out of the change machine and into eager hands. Inside the arcade machines are laid out in rows along dark wood-paneled walls. Galaga, Donkey Kong, Ms. Pac-Man, Defender, Zaxxon and Tempest: All are there blinking but today stand strangely silent. No eager hands are there to guide Ms. Pac-Man to safety from ghosts, or to do whatever Tempest does.

Tonight the kids are huddled around a bulky new game, so large it takes up the space of two normal cabinets. Instead of a single joystick, or even two, it is adorned with four. As you push closer to get a good view, you see each player has a pile of tokens laid out near their joystick. One older kid has re-purposed one of the red translucent soft-drink cups and it is perched precariously on top of the machine, half filled with tokens.

Someone scrambles to shove more tokens into the game and shockingly the game speaks: “Warrior needs food. Badly.”

Atari Gauntlet was an overnight sensation when it was released in 1985. Some members of focus groups who played pre-release versions of Gauntlet admitted to shoving up to $50 worth of quarters into the beast during a single play session. Arcade operators made insane returns. One operator made $15,000 in 16 weeks. Another reported $4,500 in just 9 days. Ultimately, Atari shipped around 11,600 machines worldwide. My personal Atari Gauntlet, #UR00323 seems to have devoured over 220,000 quarters during it’s life as a for-profit amusement machine. A number that seems simultaneously astonishing and highly plausible, considering contemporary sales reports.

Gauntlet was a huge hit despite a cheesy marketing campaign.. Much of the excitement can be attributed to some very unique (at the time) gameplay features. Gauntlet featured cooperative multiplayer, which was quite rare for arcade machines at the time. Another unique and lucrative gameplay element was “independent player entry and departure” which meant that players did not need to wait for the game to end. They could simply jump in whenever there was a free spot. In fact, there is no fixed end to the game at all.

When you consider the following elements:

Co-operative multiplayer
Independent player entry and departure
No fixed “end” to gameplay

You can see that Gauntlet is a spiritual progenitor for several genres of games. Dungeon crawlers like Diablo and even early MMORPG games like Ultima Online combined these gameplay elements to great success.

Earliest known photograph of #UR00323. Photo: C. Alexander Leigh

It is forty years since #UR00323 rolled off the assembly line and into an arcade or pizza joint where it provided good times for everyone with a few quarters and some free time. Is it possible #UR00323 could be dragged forward in time? Could the fun be shared with everyone? Could it happen on a scale that was not previously imagined?