Gauntlet is a series of
hack and slash style
dungeon crawl arcade games developed by
Atari Games. Due to its success in the
arcades,
Gauntlet was ported to several home systems of the day. These platforms include
DOS,
Apple II,
Atari 8-bit,
MSX,
NES,
Atari Lynx,
Apple IIGS,
Sega Master System,
Mega Drive/Genesis (as
Gauntlet IV),
Atari ST,
Commodore 64,
Amstrad CPC and
ZX Spectrum, among others. In 2003, an emulated version of
Gauntlet was included in
Midway Arcade Treasures; a compilation of arcade games available for the
Nintendo GameCube,
PlayStation 2 and
Xbox consoles and
Windows. For some machines, only
Gauntlet II was converted, since it was considered to be more advanced than the original. In 1990, the original
Game Boy received a version of
Gauntlet II. 16-bit conversions (Atari ST and Mega Drive/Genesis) had similar sound and graphics as the original game, and retained the four-player mode (lesser machines only allowed a maximum of two players).