In Space Gauntlet “You control a star cruiser patrolling a remote sector of the galaxy when you encounter the local inhabitants. These denizens of deep-space don’t “cotton” to strangers and they arrange themselves into two columns, firing missiles and challenging you to fly between them and survive the deadly gauntlet.”

Complete Space Gauntlet Instructions

Here is a video of Space Gauntlet in action:

Here is a printed listing for the game:

Space Gauntlet (Printed BASIC Listing)

Most (nearly all) Astrocade programmers didn’t have access to a printer for their system. Who can blame them; this was primarily a game console.  Therefore, BASIC programmers had to keep track of their programs by carefully writing them down like this:

Space Gauntlet (Hand-Written BASIC Listing)

Writing down a BASIC program by hand and keeping track of it is one thing, but check out this example of a hand-written machine language program:

Machine Music Demo – Brett Bilbrey (Hand-Written Machine Language Program)

In February of 2017, the first round of the second season of the Astrocade High Score Club featured the cartridge game Solar Conqueror and the BASIC game Space Gauntlet. There is plenty of extra information about both games in that thread on AtariAge.com, which you can read here:

HSC02, Round 1: Solar Conqueror / Space Gauntlet

In that round, the final scores for Space Gauntlet were:

1st – ranger_lennier – 410 pts
2nd – BallyAlley – 260 pts
3rd – nd2003grad – 130 pts

Do you think that you can top those scores? Then download the 300-Baud, Bally BASIC version of Space Gauntlet from BallyAlley.com, here:

Space Gauntlet (Bally BASIC, 300-Baud version)

Give this game a try! If an “AstroBASIC” version of this game exists, then it has not been archived. This means that you’re going to be using the 300-Baud interface to transfer the program to your Astrocade– which isn’t really a bad thing; it’s a neat hardware item to play around with from time to time.

Enjoy!