Dragon’s Lair
| Developer: Visionary Design | Graphics: |
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| Publisher: ReadySoft | Sound: |
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| Year: 1989 | Difficulty: |
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| Genre: Adventure-arcade | Lastability: |
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| Number of players: 1 | Rating: |
4/10 | |
This one must have drawn all eyes in arcade halls in 1983! It is the first interactive cartoon, taking advantage of the LaserDisc medium, the ancestor of DVD. It’s also the first to exploit a gameplay mechanic consisting of intervening in the course of an animation by pressing the right button within a defined (very short) timeframe. In my opinion, it’s the antithesis of a good arcade game: a concept that relies exclusively on image (of extraordinary quality, compared to contemporary games), but without substance, beyond a succession of memory and reflex tests.
You play as Dirk the Daring, a valiant knight, on a journey to rescue a princess locked in a castle guarded by a dragon. To achieve this, you must traverse a multitude of rooms and corridors, laden with obstacles. It’s impossible to progress far without knowing each scene in advance (and to do so, dying dozens of times). Worse, the expected commands follow no logic. For example, to jump over a hole in front of you, you’re asked to press “right”. Sometimes, you even need to press twice, with no hint to help you guess. The frustration must have been enormous in front of the arcade cabinet, when the machine devoured our coins and we saw all our lives lost in an instant. No room for error, always reacting in urgency, without any respite. I find this neither playable nor entertaining.
On Amiga, it’s the loading times that pose a problem. Not that they’re particularly long (about twenty seconds between each sequence), but since our life expectancy rarely exceeds two seconds, we ultimately spend more time waiting and cursing than playing. Let’s nonetheless recognise the feat of adapting it to a home computer lacking a CD drive. Well … to fit everything onto six floppy disks, half had to be cut. The remaining part was sold separately under the title Dragon’s Lair: Escape from Singe’s Castle. The same goes for the sequel, Dragon’s Lair 2: Timewarp, and its second part, conveniently dubbed Dragon’s Lair 3: The Curse of Mordread.
I’d obviously recommend the original version on the Daphne arcade emulator (MAME being incompatible), but it requires hard-to-find video files. There’s also a DVD version, playable with a remote control. Another option: buy the game on Steam in its remastered version, for ten euros.
A sci-fi variant followed in 1984 in arcades (adapted in 1989 on Amiga) under the title Space Ace.
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