I've been on such a "Xybots" Lynx kick that I decided to look up Ed Logg on YouTube. Sure enough, here he is talking "Gauntlet" in 2012. I'm only ten minutes in, and it's already a great presentation.

One thing which jumped out at me-- I'm paraphrasing: "It was really tough on arcade games at that time, because the hardware kept getting more and more expensive, yet there was huge resistance to fifty cents per play. Hmmm, we wondered how to solve that."

Sound familiar? History really does repeat itself. The solution:

"And then came 'Gauntlet'... because it was four player, I could get a whopping dollar out of the machine for just a few minutes of play." The industry today has gone with "microtransactions" and "games as a service", in an attempt to solve the identical problem. But I wonder if there is some other, parallel solution to what Ed Logg came up with during his day?