The Gauntlet reboot is tailor-made for consoles … but it’s only on PCs

SAN FRANCISCO — The new Gauntlet reboot is being developed by Arrowhead Game Studios and published by Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment, with a release date of summer 2014. I had a hands-on preview at the Game Developers Conference last week, and Gauntlet felt like a nice combination of nostalgic appeal and modern design conventions, but the lack of planned console releases is confusing. This is a game made for control pads, not a mouse and keyboard.

The original Gauntlet was a simple game. You chose one of four characters, Warrior, Valkyrie, Elf, or Wizard, walked around dungeons from a top-down perspective killing monsters, walking over treasure boxes for gold and little roast turkeys for health, finding keys that could remove walls from the playing area and open up new parts of each level, and most important, slamming quarters into the machine to keep your characters alive.