getting Wile E. destroyed, the game would cut from the action to a similar scene from a
cartoon where Wile E. met his usual fate.
I always loved the Road Runner and I thought I could bring him to a video game.
When I started I had a vision of something unique. The game certainly met that crite-
rion but it was not as fun as I had hoped. I certainly enjoying seeing all the old cartoons
and meeting Chuck Jones but...
So the game was killed?
Laser disk games were failing in the coin-op world because of reliability problems. The
game actually earned enough to warrant interest but not as a laser disk game. So when
they asked me to port it to their new “System I” hardware, I declined, saying I had
another idea I wanted to pursue. I am glad they let me pursue this new idea because this
idea becameGauntlet.Road Runnerwas converted over to System I and actually was
released.
DidGauntletfollow your initial vision fairly closely, or did it change a lot in
development?
I went back recently and
looked at the original game
design document and I was
surprised how closely the
graphics and gameplay
matched the finished product.
Of course, what did change
during development was the
hardware. I created an algo-
rithm which would allow me
to deal with 1,000 objects
without burdening the pro-
cessor or slowing down the
frame rate. I asked Pat
McCarthy, the electrical engi-
neer, if he could extend the
existing hardware and he found a way to do this which would allow me to display all the
objects I needed. In the end there were five patents issued forGauntlet.
Because of the size of the PCB and the restrictions on PCB size for Japanese kits,
we decided to use a four-layer PCB forGauntlet. Atari had never laid out such a board
nor had they ever used traces as small as we required. But in the end we paved the way
for all future PCBs at Atari. So besides the success of the game in the industry,Gauntlet
also made a giant leap in the way we did engineering and manufacturing at Atari.
To my memory of arcades in 1985,Gauntletseemed to be one of the first action
games to allow four players to play at once.
This was the first multi-player game which allowed players to end or leave at any time
and the screen scrolling was controlled by their actions. This was not the first game to
98 Chapter 6: Interview: Ed Logg
Gauntlet