From retrothing, This week is the (deep breath) twenty fifth anniversary of Dragon's Lair. For those of you who didn't grown up near the bowling alley in my hometown, Dragon's Lair was a stand-up arcade game that didn't use video graphics - it used full motion cartoons for gameplay. Animation by Don Bluth's studio lived inside the cabinet on laserdisc, a radical departure from gaming of the era.
Dragon's Lair has been released on practically every computer/console/video device ever made, totaling up to nearly 60 ports of the game trying to capture the full animation of the arcade original. Recently Digital Leisure remastered the game in HD from the original film elements - the first time a Dragon's Lair port has looked better than the original. We'll have a review as soon as I can hoodwink someone into letting me take over their Blu-ray player.
To celebrate the 25th anniversary of this remarkable game, Digital Leisure is offering 25% off of Dragon's Lair on their website today - all copies of Dragon's Lair HD will be signed by the creators of the original game. Visitors to digitalleisure.com can sign up for a drawing to win a fine-art print of the opening castle scene. Today is the end of the 25th anniversary week specials, so visit Digital Leisure now if you're interested.
10 comments:
I have this game on my computer and I still find it almost impossible to complete. You can get it as a DVD (with Space Ace) and use your remote to play it. There's also a mode where you can just watch the whole adventure.
Oh, curse this game! I love it! I hate it! No, I love it. By which I mean I hate it. Innovative, funny, gorgeously rendered. And hey, Princess Daphne was about as close to porn as you could get at 12. It had it all! But that wasn't enough for it, so it took all my damn money too and wouldn't even let me past the Lizard King.
I know, and back in the day this game cost 50 cents, which was a lot for a kid!
I LOVE DRAGON'S LAIR!
I'm so happy about this. I love the game and I also love its sequel, Dragon's Lair: Time Warp. I have a bad PC version of the first game, and a DVD version of the second, which looks a little bit better. (I love that the gameplay is so rudimentary, so sluggish, that a DVD remote can keep up.)
The mode where you just watch is pretty much the fun part for me, since I'm a miserable gamer and have never gotten very far with any computer- or video-game. It's not just that I don't practice; it's some intrinsic failure on my part, going back to childhood. I used to go around the corner to the candy store (where the long-suffering proprietors spent decades telling me and other schoolkids to buy the comics, not read them in the store) and watch cool teenagers play Dragon's Lair.
Somebody should mention that the animation is by Don Bluth studios. Bluth left Disney and formed his own company and made some successful animated theatrical features. His style is Disney-esque, but subversive as hell. In the second Dragon's Lair, Dirk ends up inside a near-perfect reproduction of Alice in Wonderland/Through the Looking Glass (chess and playing-card motifs are both reproduced) that's like a rebuke to the Disney version. Bluth's "Cheshire Cat" is a Tenniel drawing brought to life, in a way that makes the sanitized, Barbie-ized Disney version look awful in comparison.
While I'm here (I'm in the Massachusetts woods for a week with no television, no stereo, no broadband and no car, writing a book that's due at the end of October) I should urge everyone to go read my hilarious comments on yesterday's James Bond and Unbreakable posts below, since I'm in the woods all alone and crave the attention (although, as octopunk scolded me about, I'm supposed to be ignoring the Internet while I'm here). (But for me ignoring the Internet is kind of like ignoring the Earth's atmosphere.)
Blu-Ray is making me crazy. I have ~500 movies on DVD and now they're all obsolete. Matt Groening made a joke on the first "Simpsons" DVD commentary track that you shouldn't really be buying the DVDs since "in a few years" the entire format will be replaced by "something even better." I scoffed that this was impossible, but, of course, the joke's on me.
I have 2000 movies on DVD (the majority copied) and I refuse to get on the Blu-Ray train until (a) my TV dies and I'm forced to purchase a HD TV, or (b) it comes down in price (I'm thinking like 2 years). Blu-Ray movies cost about $25+ each and at a time when they are practically giving away DVDs I'm sticking with the format. Don't get me wrong, I fully appreciate the awesomeness of HD, but it's not enough of a difference (like VHS/DVD) to make me sink a lot of dough into a new format.
You can get the two Dragon's Lair games as well as Space Ace from Netflix.
Yeah, but have you seen it?
My friend Vinny has an enormous Pioneer HD screen and a PS3 (or whatever number) that can play Blu-Ray discs. After watching a single episode of LOST in HD and then watching a few minutes of Rise of the Silver Surfer I was 100% converted. It's unbelievable.
Does the Lizard King show up kind of early? I may have gotten to that part but I'm sure I never got past it.
Watching Jordan's dvd of the second one was great, because it was clearly so ludicrously difficult. I was good at a few arcade games but nowhere near hardcore enough to make a dent in that one (had I ever even seen a Dragon's Lair II arcade game, which I never did).
There was a Dragon's Lair game in Store 24 on Thayer Street. We used to sneak off campus to play it.
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