Released for the Atari Lynx in 1990, Gauntlet: The Third Encounter is a dungeon-crawler with an offbeat twist.  A mysterious Star Gem has fallen into enemy hands deep within a haunted fortress—and unless it’s retrieved, the monstrous forces feeding off its magic will soon destroy mankind. Gauntlet: The Third Encounter is a Lynx-exclusive spin on the dungeon-crawling action classic, built from the ground up by Epyx and originally titled Time Quests and Treasure Chests before acquiring the Gauntlet license. Explore 40 levels of monster-filled corridors, traps, and treasures in top-down fashion, either solo or in four-player co-op using the Lynx Comlynx system. Choose from eight wildly varied characters: familiar heroes like the Valkyrie and Wizard, or newcomers like the Gunfighter, Android, Punk Rocker, Nerd, and Samurai—each with unique weapons and abilities. The game plays in a rare vertical orientation on the Lynx and adds puzzle-solving and spell-based elements to the traditional hack-and-slash formula. Fast-paced, colorful, and strange in all the right ways, Gauntlet: The Third Encounter is both a faithful tribute and a quirky reinvention of the franchise.

The IP here was a little confusing, but we’ve cleared it up.  Time Quests and Treasure Chests was the title through most of development, and the original developers intentionally stayed far away from anything too Gauntlet-ish to avoid any copyright infringement.   The game was completed prior to Atari acquiring the Handy/Lynx.  About three weeks prior to release, Atari acquired the license for the Gauntlet franchise, and renamed it.  Since it was so different than the first two Gauntlet games (and not at all a sequel), instead of titling in Gauntlet III, they used title Gauntlet: The Third Encounter.  If you play the game, you’ll notice you can choose a character named Nerd, who is directly from Chip’s Challenge. The Core IP still belongs to Epyx, and we’re quite interested in reviving Time Quests and Treasure Chests if you’d like to help either port or modernize this offering.