Gauntlet (1985)

Gauntlet, designed by Ed Logg (Asteroids, Super Breakout), brought the party-based dungeon-crawling concept of Dungeons & Dragons to arcades. It's easy to say roleplaying games are about complex, evolving, consensual narrative experiences, but for many, particularly less imaginative players, it really comes down to killing monsters and taking their money while exploring a maze. Gauntlet fulfills this. Up to four simultaneous players could choose a distinct character: Thor the Warrior, Thyra the Valkyrie, Merlin the Wizard, and Questor the Elf, each of whom had a particular strength. Thor was an axe-wielding barbarian type who was especially good at hand-to-hand combat, the Valkyrie had a bit more resistance because she wore (some) armor, the Wizard was obviously the most powerful at using the screen-clearing magic potions, and the Elf was the fastest. Regardless of how many people are playing, the action always involves running around a level, picking up treasure, keys, and life-restoring food, and slaying monsters and the generators that spawn them on the way to finding the level's exit. 

The original seed of the game was actually an Atari computer game called Dandy (i.e., D-and-D) created by John Howard Palevich in 1983. In Dandy, players control a bow-and-arrow-wielding hero who wanders through a maze, picking up money, keys, and food, and defeating monsters. An odd quirk of Dandy is that attacking monsters will cause them to transform into different, weaker monsters until the weakest form is defeated and they die. In desperate times, the player can use a screen-clearing bomb similar to the smart bombs in Defender. Logg acknowledges having played Dandy in 1983, but there's no mention of it in the original pitch document for Gauntlet (under the name, Dungeons) and when Gauntlet was released Palevich threatened to sue Atari for stealing his game design, which earned Palevich a settlement.

Gauntlet takes the concept of Dandy and with the power of a state of the art arcade system massively improves the presentation. The graphics are clean and attractive, instantly conveying the dungeon-crawling concept. If you were already a D&D fan back then, the hulking 4-joystick cabinet stood out like a monument among other machines. Gauntlet also has one of the most memorable soundscapes of any game ever made, particularly thanks to its use of voice synthesis. To this day, all you have to do is utter "Elf needs food, badly" and people will know exactly what you're talking about.

As a gaming experience, though, Gauntlet is a classic example of how a little bit goes a long way. Once you've put about 15 to 20 minutes into it there isn't much left to discover as you've probably seen the whole variety of monster and maze types. Although the game has its own particular strategies like any arcade game, it's especially voracious about coin-eating, keeping a constant pressure on the player by ticking their hit points down at a steady rate (on top of the monster attacks), which can only be stymied by eating food or pumping in more quarters. After a while, the game starts feeling like drudgery and after more than 100 levels it simply flips back to level 1. Pity any player who spent a ton of money to see what would happen after persevering through every level only to get no reward or congratulations at all. But even so, it's still fun to go back to it and play just a little bit every now and then.