Hi everybody!
My daughter just sent me a link to this thread. She was born the same year I wrote Gauntlet. Weird.
What a blast from the past! It's pretty neat that there's still some interest in it after all this time.
The "registered version" had a number of improvements over the shareware version. There were more levels, most of which were underground, new weapons like mirvs with seekinng warheads, and a bunch of new ememies that were bigger and/or smarter. Some of the new ships would launch smaller ones and they would coordinate their attacks and stuff. There could also be twice as many objects on the screen at a time so the end levels were pretty intense. It also came with a printed manual.
The "registered version" was renamed "Gauntletak" because right after I released the shareware version Atari came out with the Gauntlet Arcade game. I had a copyrited the name Gauntlet, but after a pretty funny conversation with a lawyer about my chances about winning a lawsuit against Atari, I decided that changing the name was easier.
I sold about fifty of the registered versions. Any of them that are still out there would be labeled "Gauntletak" on the disk.
Sometime in '88 I was approached by an independent publisher who was interested in selling some of the old 8-bit games. I made a new master disk from the registered version and he sold them as "Gauntletak". I know he sold a few copies because I got a commission check from him about six months later for about five bucks. That was the last I heard of him. It might be another source of the game if anyone wants to track it down.
I don't have any of the Gauntlet software anymore. Got rid of the last of it in '98 when I found out that none of my floppies were readable. They had been stored in an attic for a few years and I guess the heat did them in. It was pretty emotional getting rid of something that I had worked on for about four years. Kind of weird how software can just disappear.
I'm actually pretty excited to see that it's still available online. Thanks for posting the links! It'll be great to see it again after twenty years!
I still have the original printed manual and probably the contact information for the independent publisher. I've just moved and most of my stuff is currently in storage, but if I find any more information I'll post it here.
In case anyone's interested, here's some history:
Gauntlet actually started out as a lunar lander program in BASIC from Antic magazine. I typed it in and then started messing around with it. Made it so you could take off again and then you had to land on different pads. Added a second lander so you could play with a friend. Started thinking "Now if only I could make them shoot at each other", but at that point I was pushing the limitations of the BASIC language. So I decided to rewrite it in assembly language.
About that time I read an article by Chris Crawford saying that it was impossible to write a bitmapped game for the Atari. I took that as a challenge and found out that he was right - IF you used Atari's video drivers which recalculate the screen resolution EVERY TIME you plotted a pixel. But if you wrote your own driver, you suddenly had a very fast gaming machine with the most horsepower available for it's time. So I kept seeing what cool things I could pack into it and Gauntlet was the result. I was trying to create a game that I wanted to play myself.
It took about two years to complete the shareware version. I did as a learning project and it was my first "real" software program. I was a hardware engineer at the time and I actually used Gauntlet to land my first programming job by describing the multitasking, queueing, data pipes, and other stuff I had learn about to create a realtime video game. Never made any money writing games, but I've been a programmer ever since.
Take care,
Don