#404: dragon’s lair
don bluth’s revenge on disney: slaying buckets of quarters
dragon’s lair (1983, arcade, cinematronics): video games have been around for a long time — since 1958, arguably — and many gamers of today simply aren’t aware of the slow evolution of the medium; concepts and design ideas that we take for granted now were created in the 80s and 90s. and not all of those concepts stood the test of time.
one of the biggest casualties of the experimental era of the late 20th century is the full motion video game, or what you might call an interactive movie. in short, FMV games use pre-recorded footage as the primary driver of graphical innovation. in the 80s and 90s, this was a sensation compared to little pixelated blobs and beepy music. but most of the games utilizing this design model simply aren’t very good, for one reason or another (all too often, there simply wasn’t enough money in the budget to hire acting talent.) but for every pile of crappy night trap or sewer shark clones there’s at least a few stand-out classics, like phantasmagoria or the surreal cult hit D trilogy. but all of these 90s games pay tribute at the altar of a game that released in 1983: dragon’s lair.
dragon’s lair is the work of two men known as renegade operators in their respective fields: rick dyer, an entrepreneur in the early days of computers, and don bluth, a former disney animator who had struck out on his own. the game’s genesis began with a failed concept called the fantasy machine, a sort of choose-your-own-adventure arcade game that never made it to production. realizing he needed something more substantial than still images, or worse, drawings on printer paper, he approached don bluth, whose recently-released animated film the secret of NIMH proved that a scrappy animator could take on disney, and which had impressed dyer.
bluth, whose garage studio needed money after the secret of NIMH only barely broke even, worked with dyer and his company, advanced microcomputer systems, to create a game dependent entirely upon what was at the time a revolutionary, but cost-prohibitive, format known as laserdisc. these enormous optical discs were the size of a vinyl record, but worked similar to the modern DVD or blu-ray. the result was dragon’s lair.
the structure of the game was simple enough: the laserdisc with the game footage was loaded into a laserdisc drive (typically a pioneer LD-1000 or PR-7820 in the early days); the drive would read the data from the disc and play the footage, changing scenes as necessary, controlled by a Z80 processor on a proprietary mainboard. the game was essentially the forerunner of the modern QTE, in that the player had to press the right button at key moments in a given scene. choose wrong, or time it poorly, and you were treated to a gruesomely hilarious death. players would have to guide an intrepid knight, dirk the daring, through a castle to rescue princess daphne from the pet dragon of an evil wizard. along the way he’ll face all sorts of threats, often appearing at a fairly rapid clip. there’s almost zero spoken dialogue, save for some help from daphne, and a litany of grunts, “uh-ohs” and homer simpson screams from dirk.
it’s an eminently simple concept, but it was a cultural phenomenon. that has more than plenty to do with don bluth’s dynamic animation, shot through with a twisted sense of humor. it was hard to resist the opportunity to slam a few quarters into a machine that felt like an interactive saturday morning cartoon; amidst games like pacman and galaga, the rubbery antics of dirk must have felt like a glimpse of the future.
it was only a glimpse, though. laserdisc players weren’t built for the kind of work dragon’s lair demanded of them, with the constant reading and scanning of the disc for the required footage, and often failed. eventually kits became available to replace the original players with newer models, but like most new formats, it was outrageously expensive. when dragon’s lair wasn’t broken, it was losing players; its simplistic gameplay, built on rote memorization, didn’t leave much room for replayability, and that’s if you can get to the end in the first place — most people ran out of quarters before then.
still, dragon’s lair proved popular enough to create a market for games like space ace, a pulp sci-fi flavored laserdisc game also animated by bluth and released a few months later, and an official dragon’s lair sequel in 1988 by bluth’s own studio (by this point, they’d moved out of the garage and into a nice place in ireland.) it also helped spawn a small army of imitators, most of them not very memorable; one of the more bizarre ones would be cliff hanger, which utilized footage from two lupin III animated films. when CD-ROM technology began to take off, early CD-based consoles began to appear, and a new generation of games utilizing full motion video came along, some of the older laserdisc games found new life on platforms like the sega CD. while probably nobody really remembers the CD-i with much fondness, the sega CD at least found an audience, which is likely how dragon’s lair managed to get a bigger following there than some of its other ports.
yes, i said “other ports.” how, you may ask, can you port a laserdisc game to another platform that doesn’t use laserdisc, or, indeed, digital media to begin with?
well, you kinda have to fudge it. ports such as those done by software project for the amstrad CPC, the commodore 64, and the ZX spectrum, turned the game into a strange sort of action game with a completely playable dirk and pixellated scenes mimicking bluth’s backgrounds. the amiga release, dragon’s lair: escape from singe’s castle, is a straighter port, using scaled down versions of bluth’s backgrounds overlaid with pixellated imitations of moving elements from the footage. the game was turned into a series of outright platformers (bad ones at that) for the NES, the SNES and the original gameboy, but incredibly, the 2000 gameboy color release was pretty faithful to the arcade version!
of course, as technology has improved, there have been more faithful ports, such as an early 2000s release by digital leisure and an iOS port, but by far the most accessible version is the HD release for steam and switch. while it suffers from controls that are at times non-responsive (i often wind up having to unplug my controllers and just using the keyboard) it’s otherwise a beautiful port, the footage remastered for modern audiences.
FMV games were probably doomed from the start. the expense in making them typically far outstripped their actual playability, to say nothing of the footage being shot typically lacking in talent — and that’s when they weren’t trying to be softcore porn, such as the execrable plumbers don’t wear ties. (link is SFW.)
still, though, there’s something to be said for the sheer brilliance of the concept in those early days. it was an early glimpse into the possibilities that video games presented, and dragon’s lair was indubitably the best of them.
