October 23rd would have been the fourth birthday of Tilt to Live: Gauntlet’s Revenge. This insanely difficult, red-headed step child of the Tilt to Live series was unfortunately discontinued when it stopped working on modern phone operating systems. Today I’m going to finally do something I’ve been meaning to do for the better part of a year: preserve the absolutely bonkers final level of the game, the Dot Bot Fortress, for posterity. I think I can count on two hands the number of people that were able to unlock this gauntlet and defeat the Dot King. We worked super hard to make a satisfying final boss for GR, and barely anyone got to play it! So here’s a video to show you what you missed.
Using tools that Alex would make for me, I (the artist) painstakingly crafted all of the obstacle variations and boss patterns for this gauntlet myself. I knew it all inside and out. But this level was so nuts, even I couldn’t earn the game’s toughest medal: finishing this in one try on hard. Hard mode in Gauntlet’s Revenge meant you couldn’t take a single hit, and the one try medal was for surviving the whole thing without using the checkpoints to respawn. I could do the three sections individually without taking damage, so I knew One Try was technically possible, but to my knowledge no one ever earned that medal. AND THEY NEVER WILL.
RIP Gauntlet’s Revenge. You were bananas.