Shack Reels: Shack's Arcade Corner: Dragon's Lair
Dragon's Lair is a one-of-a-kind cabinet with beautiful hand drawn animation by the legendary filmmaker Don Bluth. Let's delve into the dungeon in this week's Shack's Arcade Corner.
A few weeks ago, the original creators of Dragon’s Lair announced their Kickstarter to help create a movie adaptation of the game. The campaign isn’t exactly lighting the gaming world on fire as it hasn’t even reached half of its goal, which means the film may never see the light of day.
But that doesn’t mean we still can’t enjoy Dragon’s Lair, which is why for this week’s Shack’s Arcade, we take a look at the arcade classic.
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replyShack Staff posted a new article, Shack Reels: Shack's Arcade Corner: Dragon's Lair
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One of the first arcade games to require 50 cents / 2 tokens to play. Also, Dragon's Lair 3 was never produced for the arcades.
This was one of my favorite games in the arcades. It's game play may seem simplistic now (and it did then) but no one had ever seen anything like it before.
I still own one of the original Dragon's Lair laserdiscs as well as a Space Ace disc signed by Gary Goldman and Don Bluth.
Best way to play this is on the DAPHNE emulator. Hook that up to an actual scoreboard via an RS-232 connection and it's as close to the arcade as you can get (short of owning a dedicated cab). -
That jump to Stairs and then to Table in Tentacle Room were both finicky, as were the last three Black Knight hops. I was in the GA Tech student center when they wheeled Dragon's Lair in around noon-ish, and the arcade, as a whole, had completed the game before closing. I think we had 4 completed games first day.
One other thing that was different about the game was that it was the first I remember to have a second monitor on top of the cabinet for easy crowd viewing. -
I bought the Kinect version and played it a few times, but only got to try the original arcade game (back in the day) once. 50 cents to play seemed so outrageous back then.
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I must have bought ever PC version of the game starting from the Amiga onwards. Something about it just enthralled me.
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Awesome Greg, I actually got to play areal cabinet the animation and hand drawn graphics where amazing and are still today, that is one thing I love about 2D games they are timeless.
Huh very I had no idea it was so popular and that you could play it on a Laser disk player, that is really cool.
It was cool that dying was actually a highlight since it looked so good :)
Man imagine a game that you could fully control with this type of animation that be crazy.
Good stuff as always.
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I love Dragons Lair sort of like I love Tron. Something about the art style and character design really spoke to me as a kid.
Bought way too many copies of it. I can beat it usually on a couple attempts. Space Ace was also fun to play and continued the same art style.
I backed the Dragons Lair movie on kickstarter but I doubt that will ever get funded.
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