I was lucky, the arcade that had a Gauntlet had a prototype one that didn't delete foods. Once you learned the levels and got your skill up a bit, you could play it as long as you wanted. The local record: 11M points, found out that after level 999 it wraps back to level 8, 37 hour game. The guy ran up enough health that he left it sitting overnight while the arcade was closed and 60,000 health later the game was still going. My personal best was a 10-hour game, 450 levels, 4.5M points which was good enough for #2 on the Elf high score board.

I actually bought a Gauntlet II in 1995 or 1996, before I had even thought about buying my own pinball machines. Still have it and it still plays fine, even though the monitor has some nasty burn-in from when it was a Gauntlet originally.

Gauntlet's solution was to make the high scoreboard be a 'score per coin' board. One time I saw a guy who was trying to get on the Valkyrie top four (Gauntlet shows a top ten but only the top 4 survive poweroff), and another guy came in and maliciously added a quarter so that he now had to get double the score he previously needed to make the scoreboard.

Because the Ring would have started whispering to whichever eagle is carrying Frodo "You know, if you just let him slip and fall, you could have the ring". That, and the ten thousand Orcs on the plain of Gorgorath with their archers would make a pincushion out of anything that tried flying overhead.

There's actually a set of fixes to the E.T. 2600 video game that fixes most of its biggest problems:

http://www.pcworld.com/article/2032869/how-hacking-fixed-the-worst-video-game-of-all-time.html

What I want to know is: how much would Ian McKellen want? Personally, I'd much rather have callouts from Gandalf than from Bilbo anyways.

What I noticed was that he was holding those items just right to block any view of Smaug on the playfield-- not that the playfield was populated anyways. Very clever.