pixelgrotto:Mobile: Dragon’s Lair, LaserDisc games, and the constipated faces of Dirk the DaringDrag

pixelgrotto:Mobile: Dragon’s Lair, LaserDisc games, and the constipated faces of Dirk the DaringDragon’s Lair was one of the biggest games of the 1980′s, and now you can play it on your phone. Technology is amazing!Actually, Dragon’s Lair isn’t so much a game as it is a fancy interactive movie. It came out in 1983 during a unique period in the history of electronic entertainment when “LaserDisc games” were being touted in arcades as the future. LaserDiscs were basically the ancestors of CD-ROMs and DVDs, and they offered a lot more space than cartridges, including plenty of storage potential for full-motion video (FMV). At the time, FMV was perceived as leaps and bounds ahead of primitive pixel art, even though the vast majority of FMV games were never able to provide the interactive quality that video games derive their strength from. Generally, they tended to devolve into little more than “choose your own adventure” gimmicks where a player’s input would be limited to pressing a button at the right time to make the next segment of footage play. You couldn’t actually control the characters on screen, in other words, since it was all pre-rendered footage anyway. Dragon’s Lair, created by Rick Dyer, a tinkerer and early video game entrepreneur, built its entire brand upon the LaserDisc FMV concept. Full-color, splendidly animated cutscenes were the Dragon’s Lair claim to fame, and who could deny the appeal of the game’s intro, which invited players to “become a valiant knight, on a quest to rescue the fair princess from the clutches of an evil dragon!” In reality, you couldn’t become Dirk the Daring - all you could do was “guess” when to nudge the appropriate direction or press the sword button to make Dirk escape from a variety of different scenarios. The problem was, the input time provided to carry out an action was so short that playing Dragon’s Lair often became a trial of patience…and if you were actually playing it in the arcade, quarters. Lots and lots of quarters.  I originally played the PC port of Dragon’s Lair in the early 90′s, seduced by its nifty Saturday morning cartoon boxart. I did not have a flipping clue what I was doing, and it took me forever to get past the introductory drawbridge sequence because I could never press the right button at the exact second demanded by the game. Playing the mobile port now is a lot easier, perhaps because my reactions are better than they were twenty years ago. Once you’ve figured out the timing of the game’s pre-rendered sequences, “navigating” Dirk through the castle becomes easy. You can watch an entire playthrough of the game here, as a matter of fact, and one could arguably say that watching Dragon’s Lair was always a lot more fun than actually playing it. (Though the game’s death scenes are certainly worth the price of admission, if only for Dirk’s pained faces of constipation.) The animation of Dragon’s Lair remains top-notch stuff to this day, which is little surprise since it was produced by none other than Don Bluth, an ex-Disney animator whose legacy has largely revolved around chasing the coattails of the House of Mouse. This collection of Dragon’s Lair adverts and news clips from the early 80′s is fascinating, thanks to interviews with Bluth that show him gushing about how LaserDisc games are going to be the future of the video game industry. It’s kind of obvious that Bluth didn’t care that much about games themselves, but instead got excited at the idea of the medium becoming an alternate arena for traditional hand-drawn animation. You can’t blame him - at the time, games were an area that Disney hadn’t invested in yet, meaning that he was likely eager to beat his old company by aggressively expanding into this bold new frontier. LaserDiscs and interactive movies eventually ended up as little more than blips in the grand history of video games, though you could arguably say that their legacy lives on today in modern gaming’s obsession with quicktime events and “cinematic” nonsense. As for Dragon’s Lair, Rick Dyer’s creation was successful enough to spawn a short-lived cartoon series, a bunch of ports of varying quality and a permanent place on “nostalgia of the 1980′s” lists. Within a few years, the appeal of its fancy animation but minimal gameplay had worn out, and the game’s sequels never performed as well as the original. But hey, don’t let that stop you from checking out the fully restored HD release for smartphones. It’s five bucks, which might be pricey for a game that amounts to little more than a mildly interactive twelve minute cartoon, but if you’re someone who killed poor Dirk a zillion times in your youth, then it’s probably worth it.On a final note, Don Bluth never managed to reach Disney fame, though he did come pretty close with Anastasia, which seems to have experienced a cult resurgence recently. And in a somewhat depressing change of career, Rick Dyer apparently sells real estate now, although he still credits himself as an “inventor best known for creating a world renown video game Dragon’s Lair ™.” I guess even the creator of Dirk the Daring needed to hang up his sword sometime.  -- source link

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