Playing Dragon's Lair for the for first time

[butterburp]

First saw DL on Starcade and was 100% sure it was "Dragonslayer" and that it was based on the movie. I was quite puzzled when I saw the marquee with the right font but the wrong title.

 

Anyway, thus started my quest to beat the game. I bought several magazine articles that claimed to have the solution, tore out the pages and literally put them on the screen while I was playing. Every single solution was WRONG! Many an allowance went down the drain as I followed the wrong steps printed by those bozos. It took me many months and emptied piggy banks to figure out the right moves. I remember the first time I finally made it all the way through, it was such a rush and my heart was beating about 180. No, I was too young to have a thing for the Princess.

 

After the game had been out a while and people were starting to solve it right and left, the inevitable came: the arcades started ramping up the difficulty. Much less time to react on some of the screen starts. I didn't know the full sequence of scenes, so the pool room always caught me off guard. The knight on horseback was especially brutal - it added a move at the beginning, with almost no time to react. I saw one clever guy who would start pushing up repeatedly after the elevator scene. There would also be the occasional malfunctioning machine, and as someone else pointed out, it is infuriating. I met one machine that would often move twice, despite my best efforts to push only once. At that point it was time to play Qbert instead.

[retrorussell]

I didn't play it when it came out-- the extra token/quarter required to play, plus what appeared to be a steep challenge, scared me off. I finally got into it a decade later when it came out for the Sega CD. I eventually figured out all its nuances and beat it with one life. The death scenes are marvelously hilarious.

[iesposta]

I was 16 when Dragon's Lair was put in the bowling lanes we went to once a week ,(parents were in Leagues).

First time I saw the end, rescuing the Princess and seeing her soft-core porn see-through top was a thrill.

 

My brothers and I got so good we chose places to die like the riding all the way down the platform elevator shaft and splat!

Why did we "choose to die"?

Because there's a score! To get a High Score you have to play a perfect game and use all but your final player.

Dying makes the next life go through scenes again, adding more to your score.

 

Fun fact is the emulation of the arcade game can use a real attached red number segment led display to show the score. The emulation also has a software score that can be overlaid on the animation. The $35 Raspberry Pi 2 or Pi 3 plays the emulator Daphne perfectly.

I had the DVD "game" version, and that can be used as a key to download the animation frame files for Daphne and they are nicer than the Laser Disk and the DVD.

[atarilovesyou]

Ah, Dragon's Lair. Everybody has already given their story about it, so I'll do the same (even though I'm sure I've done it at least once already in the last decade). Those of us who were young and impressionable really thought that we would be able to control a cartoon...and, each one of us was disappointed when we found out that pressing the 'sword' button did...NAH-SING! ..for the most part. But another thing was the fact that this cartoon was unlike any cartoon you'd watch on Saturday morning...it was dark, there was actual (implied) death, and that alone was another reason why it sat in my psyche for years. I love the game, and I do consider it a game. Playing it on a dedicated machine is the best way to play, but man...where to even find a working specimen these days that runs the original hardware? Who knows.

 

It was a 50 cent game, which at the time was quite the thing. Were it a quarter, it wouldn't have seemed so elite, I'm sure. Kinda like when years later, I saw the release of Outrun in the arcade...50 cents. Whoah. And it wasn't even the sit down version

 

Dragon's Lair was something I read about far before I actually saw one. And I'm sure I saw Space Ace and Thayer's Quest far more frequently. I never really was any good at Space Ace, but we popped many quarters into Thayer...although it was timed, and you never really got your money's worth (read: we were broke kids without allowances, lol...you had to be really picky). Dragon's Lair was just this amazing thing to see, and hear. The soundtrack was dark, the weird sounds that Dirk made when running around, and the sounds he made when he died, all memorable (not the least of which, Daphne). Finding a working machine was also paramount. If the timing was off, or the stick didn't work properly, you were doomed. You basically dropped your quarters and hoped for the easy levels to show up first. Which was another weird thing: we never got to play the game 'in order', it was always random. Which wasn't so bad unless you got the really difficult levels first. And there wasn't any 'blip' to help with what to do...you basically had to watch another (generally older) player go for it, then pick their brains. But since it was so expensive anyway, it didn't really stick around all that much. I never saw it for a quarter...and that would have been enough for us to team up on it. I also remember we had a lot of fun with Cobra Command, which was actually a quarter...but none of us realized that you had to shoot at the targets at specific times: we just blasted at everything and wondered why we died all the time At one point I got pretty good at it, but never to the point of finishing the game. Thank God for youtube...Cobra Command for the NES was eternally doomed in our eyes for lacking the video (and remember, pre internet? We actually thought there was an FMV version of Dragon's Lair for the Colecovision!...nobody knew it was actually just a regular game that was made within the limits of the hardware...so how come the NES couldn't do it? Damn you Data East! )

 

I remember seeing a spot in the news in the late 80s talking about this upcoming revolution in games...the 16 bit movement. It showed some Genesis games, but something in particular really wowed me: the description of "It Came From the Desert"...this was probably a CES thing from the time, and they showed some of the FMV from that game on the Turbografx 16 (CD ROM attachment, of course)...but they described it as 'actually controlling the characters in a real movie!' ....and I believed it all, just drooling at the prospect. Finally, I thought, the technology to actually control a character in a movie, just like Dragon's Lair tried to do, finally!!!...needless to say, I never did play It Came From the Desert. I saw the screen shots in a magazine and was thoroughly disappointed, lol. But the CD ROM for the Turbo brought on other amazing things for the time: ACTUAL SPEECH in a home console game, real life speech! I was drunk, it was Valis I believe, at this rich kid's house. Wow, I thought. Kid even had the handheld Turbografx. Man was I jealous

 

Anyways, I hated FMV games in the 90s, with a few exceptions. Mad Dog McCree was a great light gun game, and I always played that when I had the chance (again, when the light gun was calibrated properly, your skills were usually rewarded). Then Dragon's Lair 2 Time Warp came out, and that was fun too. You had the blips to help you time your moves, the cartoon was funny, and you lasted far longer than the first game. The time rewind thing was hard to work around, but we still had a lot of fun with it. This was near the dying days of arcades in my town, and the last gasp was that "Time Traveller" game from Sega...well, I think Sega distributed it. That was fun, but hard as hell. The common theme for all these games was you needed a machine that actually worked in good order to have fun. And it was really different. I only think that my disillusionment with FMV started with Sega CD and that terrible Sewer Shark game...yuck.

 

So now, I've got the Digital Leisure trio of Dragons Lair 1, 2, and Space Ace. I have their releases of Time Traveler and Thayer's Quest (I even have that 'sequel' that came out, the one without Bluth...I've never put much time into it). These games play on DVD players but the input just isn't fast enough to register and enjoy the games properly. I've found, however, that it has a lot to do with the speed of your DVD player. Some are better than others. On the Playstation 2, they're simply unplayable IMO. The inputs just don't feel right. The only way I've found is to play them on my aging TV/DVD combo...for some reason, that DVD player just rips in speed. It's still shitty to play these games on a remote control, but at least the timing is right. I've tried the games on a Sony, a Panasonic...no player works as well as my combo, which is some cheap Walmart sourced TV (probably the last of the CRTs you could buy at the time from Walmart, 2008, I think?).

 

I've been trying to track down the Wii version, but now that the price climbs higher, I don't know if I'll be able to. One sold complete for close to 45 USD (less shipping) and that's kinda crazy, but if I see one at a retro game show and it's in good shape, I'll bite. I've heard it's just an amazing playing version of the games, nice and quick. Oddly enough, what made me really get into Dragon's Lair was when I rented it for a borrowed Panasonic 3DO back in the mid 90s. That version was great and I got further than ever...I stayed up all night trying to figure it out, I don't think I got past the chessboard knight. But that was the first time I could play it 'in order' so to speak, with the chapters that made sense. Actually, I lie: I did make it to the end, but I couldn't beat Singe. And I don't think you got unlimited continues. I was so close! I was thinking maybe it would be cheaper to just get a 3DO and the disc, along with the few other 3DO titles that I liked from back then (Need for Speed on 3D0 was really something else...I'm dying to play it again, mainly nostalgia driven but also because it had these great FMV rewards for driving better...whatever the AI was in use, it also knew exactly which videos to save on the replays: one escape from the cops was so damn close that that here, some 20 plus years later, I remember it like yesterday. Good times!).

 

Anyways, Dragon's Lair. Awesome then, awesome now...as long as you have the right means to play it as it was intended. I'll always love it.

[zzip]

​Everyone is mentioning that the game was 50 cents. I don't remember that being the case at my arcade, I think it was just a quarter.

 

Dragon's Lair is definitely a "game". Specifically, it's entirely based around quick time events (QTE). It's probably one of the earliest forms of this, even.

 

It might even be the first example of QTE game as far as I'm aware. The term QTE didn't even exist yet, let alone the stigma about them. That's what modern gamers miss when they dismiss it as "just a bunch of QTEs"

[NE146]

50 cents? More like a dollar where I come from... which was often probably the most I would have sometimes when I went to an arcade as a kid. So darn bet I didn't blow it all for a few seconds of Dragon's Lair to try and figure it out.

[+Cafeman]

I'd buy the $5.00 sack of tokens at Aladdins Castle. You'd get 30 tokens (iirc). I bet I spent the whole thing on DL one of those visits.

[Jumpman1981]

However, unless the hint system is active (i.e., areas highlight giving some kind of indication as to what and where you need to push), it's extremely difficult to get into and appreciate.

 

The highlighted areas appear no matter what difficulty it's set to, rips of the LaserDisc prove that it's in the animation itself.

[Austin]

The highlighted areas appear no matter what difficulty it's set to, rips of the LaserDisc prove that it's in the animation itself.

 

Hm, I'm not so sure about that. If it was in the animation itself then one would assume that the highlights would be featured in other versions. For instance, in the Sega CD one they are missing (which makes playing it a guessing game of trial and error).

[retrorussell]

The Sega CD one did have some instances of hints but not usually. That did make it very difficult, as did some very demanding timing for your actions, but I still liked it because as grainy as it was they captured the look of the game very well.

[Jumpman1981]

www.youtube.com/watch?v=znO_m00s8I

 

Here's the video footage direct from the Laserdisc I mentioned which proves that the flashes are part of the animation.

 

I think the Sega CD version was encoded wrong because you can also see the "Dirk Reviving" animation at the start of the scene even if you haven't died

Edited October 28, 2017 by Jumpman1981

[Osgeld]

i know they are in the PC version which is the same vintage of the sega CD, I used to set it up as a party kiosk and everyone had fun trying to figure it out, till they knew what the flashes meant, then the cat was out of the bag, but everyone was settling down to music or movies for the sleepover

 

wow I feel old now, that was on my 386/25 with 6 hell yea 6 megs of ram and a single speed CD rom (and that was old and cheap enough for a high school freshmen to afford even then after working my ass off all summer)

Edited October 28, 2017 by Osgeld

[RangerG]

This is one of the games for me that you had to be there to appreciate it. I remember standing with a crowd watching the game and the screen above the machine. The person playing was a hero to all if he/she was good and got far. When I see or play the game now without the newness and the arcade and the excitement, it is just an average game. The same holds true for Gauntlet. I have great memories of playing with others in the arcade and trying to get as far as our quarters would let us (with the machine's voice drawing attention to our plight). Now, the game is free and endless and just not the same.

[H.E.R.O.]

I first saw Dragon's Lair in Penn Station in NYC in 1983. There were two arcades in Penn Station, Station Break & Space Station. Station Break had DL out front with a color TV on top of the cab so the surrounding crowd could see the gameplay.

 

The most vivid memory I have of Space Station is that they had several Space Invaders cabs running in the front windows but they were UPSIDE DOWN & hanging off the ceiling.