On this day in 1985, the original Gauntlet hit arcades. It may not have been the first co-op game, but it was one of the earliest co-op dungeon crawlers.
Readers of a certain age will remember “Asteroids” – the wildly popular arcade game that made its debut in 1979 and again in 1981 with the release of the Atari 2600 home video game console.
In 1988, HAL Laboratory released three NES games, ports of the arcade games Defender II, Millipede, and Joust. One doesn’t associate HAL Laboratory with arca.
The spaceship and the floating asteroids are all simple forms of a few white lines set on a background of black, but the thrilling gameplay was enough to get players to spend quarter after quarter in 1981 alone, Americans put 20 billion quarters through arcade games, playing 75,000 man-hours on them.Two aspects of Asteroids its wraparound screen and the way asteroids are destroyed helped make the game a stunning success.