Can Gauntlet II be soloed?

Jeff Gerstmann continues his quest to play and rank every 8-bit Nintendo game. He's getting damn close: there are 573 games on the list, and there were 677 officially licensed games released in North America. He's also doing the unlicensed games, but that number I'm unsure about: I've seen "90" floating around, but that seems like far too many for that time period. I wonder if that includes modern homebrew projects, or if they count every game in Action 52 as a discrete entity. Nonetheless, he's around 80-85% of the way there, which is impressive! I burned out well before that point when I tried to do the Atari 2600; but for me it was a side-project, not part of my job, so I'll try to cut myself some slack.

On Friday's episode he ranked an interesting batch of games, including one I played to death as a kid, Gauntlet II. It did not do well on the list: I won't spoil the number (you can see the list at 8bitnintendo.science if you're curious), but I'll just say it ranked considerably lower than Dinowarz: Destruction of Spondylous.

I expected this: as fondly as I remember the game, I've long believed it's only playable as a cooperative multiplayer game. I spent dozens of hours playing it with my friend Mike, he as the wizard and me as the warrior (or vice-versa), hack and slashing our way through hordes of monsters, solving the occasional puzzle level, until we finally bested the legendary level 100. After that, the game loops back to level 1, so for all intents and purposes we completed Gauntlet II.

There are two reasons I didn't consider the game playable solo.² The first is the continue system. Like the arcade version, Gauntlet II supports between 1 and 4 players. We never had the special multi-tap device needed to play with 3 or 4, so it was just me and Mike. That's plenty to finish the game, though, because as long as at least one player is still alive, you can press start to continue playing after you die, with your life fully restored. It's possible for the game to end if both players die simultaneously, but you have to be pretty careless to let that happen. The game effectively gives you an infinite number of quarters you can enter to stay in the game. It's kind of surprising that we still found the game interesting, because this negates most of the challenge. I guess getting to level 100 was more of an endurance test, because there are no saves and no passwords. If you turn the console off, you lose all your progress. I'm sure we had to leave the console on overnight one weekend to finally finish it, which isn't great for the console or the electricity bill, but y'know. We were kids.

Playing solo, you get no continues. You start the game with 2000 health. That number slowly ticks down, and any damage you take reduces it more quickly. You have to find enough food in the dungeon to keep that number above 0, or you lose. You have to start back at level 1. No saves, no passwords.

Nonetheless, I would have only thought the the game is very difficult, not impossible, if it weren't for the dragons. Every few levels, the exit is guarded by a vicious fire-breathing dragon that takes a huge number of hits to defeat. With the help of a partner, you can outsmart the dragon: One player can stand off the side, drawing its fire while taking cover behind a wall. While it's distracted, the other player can sneak around and attack the dragon safely. But when you play solo, there is no cover. All you can do is get up in its face and get clobbered. Even if it's possible to tank enough damage to defeat it (which I doubt), you're not going to survive for very long after that. There are no "full health" items in Gauntlet. You can only restore your health 50 or 100 points at a time, and healing items appear sporadically. Dropping below 500 is effectively a death sentence.

Still, watching Jeff play prompted me to start up a game. I wanted to satisfy my curiosity about a mechanic: Jeff complained, playing as the Valkyrie, that it took 2 magic potions to defeat Death.

📖 Gauntlet II Game Manual

Potions: Give you the magic power to stun or destroy monsters and monster generators.

Death: Death will drain your health, taking up to 200 points, and then die himself. The only way to get rid of Death is with magic - don't even think of fighting him hand to hand!

Maybe in the original Gauntlet, potions were universal, but I remembered the effect of potions being class-dependent: if the Wizard used a potion, it would destroy every monster generator and enemy on the screen (except a dragon). Other characters had weaker magic but better physical abilities.

Well, I could've confirmed this by reading the manual, but I started a game as a wizard and verified that they can indeed destroy Death with one potion. Jeff was playing as the character with the third-weakest magic. Only the warrior is worse.¹

To my surprise, I wasn't doing too badly. It took me awhile to kill monsters, and I was taking a lot of damage, but I managed to find enough food to keep me in decent health. With only one player, you don't have to spread the food around, and you're at much lower risk of accidentally shooting it, which in some ways made it less annoying to play. I was having a surprisingly good time, so I kept playing. I thought I might even make it to the first dragon, at which point I'd hit a hard wall and have to call it quits.

One difference in how I'm playing now vs. as a kid is that I'm paying attention to the items and trying to figure out how to use them effectively. I don't remember whether we had the manual back then, but if we did, I don't think we found it very helpful. That shouldn't be a problem, in theory: Gauntlet II is a fairly faithful port of the arcade game, and like most arcade games is designed to be learned by playing. One of the coolest features of the NES version at the time is that it was the only video game I'd ever seen that speaks to the player in complete sentences. This speech is fairly uncommon, but when it happened, you knew it was important. "Blue Wizard shot the food." Shit, I have to be more careful. "Red Warrior now has temporary invisibility." Cool! Oh wait, all the monsters are attacking the wizard now! We should let me get that next time. Etc.

However, one item doesn't have a speech sample when you pick it up, just a sound effect. Let's call it the "shuriken amulet":

Now, it's obvious what this item does as soon as you attack: it super-charges your shots. Your projectiles destroy enemies in one hit, and can destroy multiple monsters in a row. Neat, but I always thought its effect wears off too quickly, and considered it fairly useless. Your shots go back to normal after like 10 seconds. However...

📖 Gauntlet II Game Manual

10 SUPER SHOTS: These shots eliminate all monsters in their path and keep traveling until they hit a wall.

Ah, so it's not constrained by time, but by number of shots! Still pretty limited, but I wondered: if I cleared a path to the exit, went back for this power-up, and used all 10 shots against the dragon, would that be enough to kill it? I was skeptical, but they did put two of these power-ups on level 18, the first level where you encounter a dragon. Maybe the designers were trying to tell us something.

So I tried it, and the super shot slayed the dragon in one hit. I barely took any damage. I collected the spoils of battle: a pile of treasure worth a whopping 150 points $$toot$$ and a magic potion that permanently increased my character's speed. I proceeded to level 19 with around 1200 health, Merlin the Dragon-Slayer.

You can see a video of me clearing level 18 here. Note that this isn't my actual game; I loaded a save state and re-played from the beginning of the level to record this video.

This brings me to an unfortunate caveat: even having made this discovery, I doubt I'll ever be able to pull it off on actual hardware. Planning out this run and fighting with the stupid teleporters required multiple false starts. I'll never have the patience to replay the game from level 1 every time I made a mistake, so I'm using emulator save states to add my own fair continue system: I allow myself to save the state at the beginning of each level. This seems more than fair, considering how easy it is to continue indefinitely in multiplayer; single-player continue feels like a feature they just forgot to implement. I don't know if I'll stick with it until the end, but I'm having a good time for right now. If nothing else, I killed the dragon, which I always thought was impossible, so my inner child is happy.