Dragon’s Lair Overhaul Black Edition (1/16th scale)

I liked Dragon's Lair and played it quite often, but my favorite of the laserdisc video games was "Cliff Hanger," which used footage from two Lupin III films. It mostly used footage from the Hayao Miyazaki movie The Castle of Cagliostro, but included footage from The Mystery of Mamo as well.

Time Traveler and the hologram fighting game were both pretty bad. You were definitely pumping the quarters into the right machines.

In case anyone else was wondering, to make it a Dragon’s Lair arcade for ants, it would need to be 1/2000 scale.

https://www.quora.com/If-humans-where-the-size-of-an-ant-how...

I had a chance to buy this when there were 19 left, but hesitated at the 1/16th scale description on HN, which seemed kind of small. By the time I figured out it was 1/6th scale, they were all gone. Oh well.

That is drilled into my skull right next to “apply directly to the head” and “where’s the beef?!”

Yes, and Space Ace. And I loved them both.

FWIW: "…a redesign of our original 1/6th scale Dragon’s Lair x RepliCade with exclusive features and updates including: a more powerful processor to enable HDTV screen mirroring…"

Dragon's Lair in general is more fun to watch than play, it's so nice to look at even after I knew it was a waste of quarters I'd still occasionally get baited into playing it.

According to a random Wikipedia article I found, in 1983 the three top-grossing arcade games were Ms. Pac-Man, Pole Position, and Dragon's Lair. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983_in_video_games

Compare the graphics of those three games. Dragon's Lair was groundbreaking, even if the gameplay was quite limited to account for technological and budgetary limitations.

Because Don Bluth cartoons are awesome, especially the tons of death scenes animated for this game. Whenever someone made it to a screen that I hadn't seen, I was absolutely giddy and filled with dread over what was about to kill him. The game was bad and consisted of guessing when you should press buttons. Skill was gained through memory and constant application of quarters.

It was laserdisc based with full motion animation graphics. It looked and sounded like _nothing_ else in the arcade. The best graphics in other games at the time were things like Donkey Kong and Ms. Pac Man (i.e. cutesy low resolution pixels and beeps/bloops of sound). Dragons Lair was awe inspiring--you were _controlling_ a real cartoon, like what you might have dreamed of doing while watching cartoons on TV.

There were prompts FYI, the button you needed to press would quickly flash and you had fractions of a second to smash it. The whole point of the game was kind of to infer the right action from what was happening on screen too, i.e. if a skeleton is swinging a sword at you then you probably want to jump away from them but not into a nearby pit.

> It seems like it was a QTE game with no prompts.

I believe Dragon's Lair was the first QTE-style game, or at least the first popular one.

Also, Princess Daphne needed my help, dude.

My memory of it is that it looked amazing. It still does. It's a Don Bluth cartoon short, more or less. But the game itself was frustrating and terrible. Even on easy you had to really nail the inputs or instantly die.

It looked so good that even after I learned it was a waste of quarters as a kid, I still occasionally would get baited into playing. I remember the last time I played it was at a restaurant waiting for a table, there was an anteroom before the bar with a cocktail table Pac-Man and Dragon's Lair. After about 20 minutes of waiting I actually thought... "What if it's not bad, what if the machines I tried before were just faulty or abused." as I watched the intro loop from across the room. Nope, same anguish.

No offense, but it's amazing to me the appeal of something like this wouldn't be clearly evident given the time it was released. That game and other similar QTE types of that era give me chills whenever I see one in an arcade still. It seemed like something out of the future. It's one of those things of that era so vibrant that it goes hand in hand with things like ET or Thriller as being especially exciting and memorable.

Part of it was the Secret of Nimh connection... unsure if the film was a huge success, but it definitely left a mark on that period of time. To have a game in that animation style, with a hilarious premise, incredible sound system, etc, was a complete sensory overload against the pixellated mess that surrounded it.

I remember seeing it the first time during summer of '83 on a family trip to Vegas. They carved out a section with a platform in the middle arcade at the Flamingo Hilton, there must have been 50 people just watching whomever was playing it.

From what I recall it was also the first game to cost 50 cents, and you would have to wait an hour or more in line for the honor maybe during the first few months if your arcade was so lucky to have a machine. I remember the first I was able to play it without waiting, must have been around Christmas that year.

The game's video was full motion NTSC video. It played off a LaserDisc inside the cabinet. Because LaserDiscs have direct access capabilities, when the game needed to play a scene it was just giving the player a time index to play. The logic of the game was keeping track of the current playhead and was expecting certain input at certain timestamps, some element on the screen or the action button would flash and you'd have a fraction of a second to hit the button or the joystick in the right direction. If you didn't you died and the game played one of the many death animations.

It was...fun in that it was a gorgeous game compared to other games in the arcade. Unfortunately it usually cost like a dollar in quarters for a single play. You only had two or three lives (I can't remember exactly) and the reaction time was very brief and unforgiving.

This was a time when the typical arcade game was a quarter for a few lives and if you were good you could get tens of minutes (or more) of play out of a quarter. It wasn't until years later with the home release that I even saw even halfway through the game. I've never once seen anyone get further than a quarter of the way through the game in an adcade.

gen x'er here saying the obvious "I guess you had to be there" ;)

it was the first QTE game, the first animated game with full NTSC laserdisc graphics, the first game to cost 50 cents to play, and just watching someone else play was entertaining enough so the cabinet ALWAYS had a crowd of people around it.

The only other time I regularly saw such a crowd around a single arcade cabinet was when Mortal Kombat came out while I was in college.

If you look at other popular arcade games of this era and what they had to offer graphically and sound-wise, you may start to see the appeal of a fully animated controllable game with a movie soundtrack.

Most Gen X gamers' memories of this game entail the (also entertaining) death animations. Because it was also FUCKING hard, lol. The hinting of QTE games today is positively luxurious compared to Dragons' Lair.

I think it's hilarious that the Daphne emulator has to actually simulate the playback-head delay of the (now nonexistent) laserdisc player to get the timings right, lol. Like it literally has to have a model of the disc itself in its emulation so it can estimate how long it would have taken the playback head to get from wherever it is virtually to wherever it is supposed to go virtually because the game incorporated these delays into its gameplay and simply supplying the right video data as soon as it is requested in naive emulation would make it work too fast, lol

Agreed. I could pick the audio from either out of a noisy room.