Dragon's Lair arcade was amazing (to watch)

I remember when this game came to what was then my favorite place to go as a kid which was Showbiz Pizza. Showbiz was a chain of restaurants that featured and animatronic band playing tunes on stage and relatively decent pizza ( I was like 8 years old, so i wan't really fussy.) However, there was no denying what the main attraction of this place was... The massive arcade area.

One day when we went in a game that looked like a movie was featured at the front entrance and like most people in the 80's due to the absence of internet, I had never heard of it.

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While I was already extremely interested in pretty much all arcade games just like a vast majority of people in that time, Dragon's Lair combined the two things I loved the most at the time: Video games and cartoons. Plus, the action was so fluid because of a new technology that had just been created called LaserDisc technology. We couldn't even fathom what that even was in 1983.

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The graphics were so crisp because of the fact that you really weren't controlling a great deal of it. The animations would continue until brief moments where you had to push the joystick in a certain direction or use the sword button with a great deal of precision or you would die. There were brief pauses between the actions after you made a choice, correct or not, but given the time period it actually flowed extremely well.

I would find out years later that the reason why the animation was so incredible was because an ex Disney-animator, named Don Bluth. Once you realize that, you can definitely see the similarities between this game, and many Disney films.

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I say that this was a fun game to watch because playing it was going to be an expensive venture. This was the first game i can ever recall that would cost 2 tokens to play instead of the usual 1. Also, if you didn't already know the various scenes that were coming up there was very little chance you were going to make the correct decision. You only got 3 tries before your game was up.

One day I was in Showbiz Pizza when an adult was in there, and went through nearly the entire game on one life and all of us were "ooohing" and "aaahhhing" behind him. It's strange to think of a random stranger in an arcade being a bit of a hero, but that was exactly how me and my friends viewed him.

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There you can see what a lot of the game was all about and the player actually failing from time to time also. The entire playthrough by someone that knew what they were doing wasn't actually all that long but it was impressive to see because unlike the home ports that would happen many years later, there were no on-screen indicators of which direction you were supposed to press, you simply had to keep trying and dying until you figured it out.

While a game like this could quite easily be ported to a mid-range mobile phone these days, this was unprecedented technology in the early 80's and 2 other games were produced by the same studio.

I never even played it very much because normally my parents would give me a budget of around $2 to play with at dinner and that could easily be lost on Dragon's Lair in 5 minutes.