Top arcade games: Dragon's Lair

This game will probably be in the record books somewhere for being one of the most successful arcade releases of all time. I don't know if you are old enough to remember when it just started appearing in arcades, or even if you are old enough to have experienced actual arcades, but it was a very big deal

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While the graphics in the game aren't anything particularly special today, they were leaps and bounds ahead of everything that was available in 1983. You need to consider that back at that time we were still being subjected to games like Dig Dug, variations of Pac Man, Donkey Kong, and the likes of which the entire library of all arcade games combined would fit on a single USB stick that exist today.

Dragon's Lair was like watching a movie, or at least a really nicely done cartoon, yet you kind of controlled the action. It was also pretty graphic for a game and this raised a lot of eyebrows as well.

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It is the first arcade game that I can recall that cost 50 cents as well. I think I maybe played it one or two times because it certainly isn't easy and I was likely dead almost straight away. You see, you didn't really control Dirk (the hero) directly because technology at the time wasn't capable of producing graphics like that on the fly. What was really going on was there was a movie being played off of a laser disk, and there would be certain portions of it where you had to hit a button or move in certain direction in order to progress. There was usually only one way to do a section correctly, and a lot of ways to do it wrong.

Since Al Gore had not yet invented the Internet, we couldn't look up how to progress through a certain portion and the only way that you could get better at it would be to go through some serious trial and error. However, if you could get through a certain portion of the game you would kind of be a bit of an arcade hero. The arcade unit at my local Showbiz Pizza had a premium unit that would not just display your game in front of you, but also on a second screen above your head. It was not uncommon for this game to attract a crowd of kids and fellow nerds (I was a kid then, I did become a nerd later though.)

A little history

The game was the brainchild of Rick Dyer who hired former Disney animator Don Bluth to do all of the animation and voices. The entire project was done on a budget of 1.3 million dollars. When the game first went out to launch, they only had enough stock to supply the industry with a total of 1,000 units. It didn't take long for word to spread about how impressive and innovative this arcade box was (let alone that it was bringing in tons of money for the arcades) and in no time, there was a back log of nearly 8000 more requested units.

In the first 7 months the machines had generated $32 million for the game company.

Obviously, the machine was not something that could be replicated at home easily, or really at all. It would be another 11 years before any home console would have the processing power to bring this game into our living rooms and those were still pretty terrible adaptations of the game, Sega CD being the only console that offered it that had any sort of widespread ownership.

In the above video, every time you hear a "dink" sound was when a choice had to be made, not doing so or choosing incorrectly at that time would result in losing a life, of which you had (you guessed it!) only 3.

They would go on to make 2 more versions of this game and also Space Ace, which was basically the same game but in a Sci Fi setting. I was more of an observer than a player when this was in arcades because I was likely on an allowance of something like 5 dollars a week at the time. You could easily spend that on this game in an hour.

Were you there when this was released? What did you think?