Why the New Gauntlet is Wise to Keep Things Simple

Eurogamerìs Chris Donland has penned and published a short preview on the upcoming Gauntlet reboot, and for what it’s worth, he thinks Arrowhead is on the right track with the title. Here’s a snippet:

The new Gauntlet has a better than average chance of success, however. It’s the first release from Warner Bros’ new Vault initiative, which sees its arcade classics – which are generally Midway’s arcade classics – reworked as snappy little digitally distributed games, yours for keeps for a small fee. Gauntlet comes with Arrowhead Game Studios as developer, which feels like a distinct advantage. That’s the Arrowhead who made Magicka, the dial-a-spell dungeon crawler that offers the kind of hectic multiplayer chaos that fans of Gauntlet will already be familiar with.

It was Magicka that got Arrowhead the deal, in fact. “It came from one of those weird meeting things that happens at games conferences,” says art director Rob Tatnell. “Our CEO and one of the designers were there, and Warner Bros said, ‘Hey, we really enjoyed Magicka. Let’s have a chat.’ They told us they had these old IPs that we might want to look at. We went through the list and some of them might have been kind of fun, and then they said, ‘Oh, we also have this other game. You might have heard of it. Gauntlet?’ The guys just looked at each other and there was this moment: Aww, don’t lose your cool amongst all these suits! It just grew from that.”

The secret to resurrecting a classic, as far as Arrowhead tells it, is to understand what made it a classic in the first place. That underlying simplicity isn’t an invitation to build complexity – it’s the sole reason the whole thing works. Beneath the chunky 3D artwork, this is Gauntlet as a 1980s school kid might have recognised it, then: choose your hero, vacuum up loot, and whack as many meanies as you can while you work from one room to the next.