Beg your Mom for some quarters, jump on your bike, ride down to that dark, smokey, noisy and slightly dangerous home for one of your video games the Arcade!
Dragon’s Lair wasn’t just an arcade game, it’s was like a movie. It set the the bar for animation and blew the doors off what people thought arcade games were. Animated and directed by the great ex-Disney animator Don Bluth, this game was the first laser disc game. It would play the disc and your reaction time would prompt the next track to be played. If you were too slow, you would get the dreaded skeleton exposed death animation.
(Click image below to watch the entire game):
I featured this game in the short video games because it was one of the first games I saw that really blew my mind. Yes, the design and animation was as unbelievable, but the game was almost unplayable because it was so hard. You needed to memorize every single move and get the timing perfect or game over. I learned that the way to get better at the game was to watch other people play and try to memorize what to do, but that still didn’t guarantee that you could get that tricky timing right though.
That game must have made so much money just because, not only was it super hard, but I think it was one of the first 50 cent games.
What were your memories of Dragon’s Lair? How much money did you lose in trying to see the ending? Do you remember the chess level?
Only got passed the first attack. Never any farther. The only way I saw the whole game was watching it with you.
I don’t really have much of a memory of DL in the arcades myself (or even playing it), but I do faintly recall others that showed up later like Cliff Hanger and MACH 3. Either the game wasn’t available at these places or it just didn’t came under my radar.