Duration: 5:51

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This video was shot at Funspot in Weirs Beach, NH back in November 2008. I played for 5 minutes as a gameplay sample for anyone who hasn't seen the game in action.

Quartet is a 4 player side-scrolling platform action game that came out in 1986 on Sega's System16 arcade hardware. It is similar to Atari's Gauntlet where players can buy in more health per coin inserted and the characters have different speed and firepower types between them. The differences are that the game is in a sci-fi setting and platform gaming skills come into play as well as powerup management, Exit health bonus strategy, and team coordination for survival.

While team gameplay seemed all the rage for the time this came out in the arcades, I see it as a slight flaw when it comes to one key character design issue, when you jump and land on another player's head, you bounce. There are plenty of moments in this game where you are in tight quarters and you really need to make some precision jumps because of patrolling flying enemies and you have the player-seeking blobs slowly creeping up on you. Then one of the other guys decides to clear house, shooting everywhere and gets himself hit, drops the key, lands on someone's head with his prone body just bouncing and the player under him needs to get out of there but gets tagged by the same-color blob and...well, you get the idea. Teamwork and patience is essential.

Quartet was also made into a two player version called Quartet 2, where the characters were chosen via mini-menu, like Metal Slug but with names only instead of mini-protraits. Much to my disappointment when I first saw the machine way back when, it was just a 2-player model and not a sequel. And half a quartet is really a duet.