Review: The Golden Era of Gaming, The 80s - Dragon's Lair (Cinematronics, 1983)

Think... at the 80s, what do you think the typical video games to look like. Pacman, Mario, Donkey Kong, etc. The graphical hardware limitations might be a factor in determining the depiction of the characters of the games. They are nothing but sprites, mishmash of pixels being fused together into something that makes it look like something that people could imagine (and boy! Video games of the 80s does require a whole lot of imagination to make sense).

Super Pitfall!, one of a classic 1980s game.

It would be safe to imagine that all of the games of the 80s look like a standardized colour blocks aligned to each other, like the picture above, right?

...The answer is not... quite...

Ladies and Gentlemen, may I present to you this:

Dragon's Lair

...And no, I am not bluffing, this game was made in 1983, it was released to the arcade system (Proof, if you don't believe me).

From what I've shown you, it won't be a surprise but at that point of time, the graphics provided on this game is the piece-de-resistance. It was often considered as the most revolutionary; it became revolutionary enough for people to pay twice the usual price for an arcade machine usually is at that time ($0.50 rather than the usual $0.25). To add more on the game's impact on the history of video gaming, this game is one of the three video games that are featured on the Smithsonian Institution, along with Pacman and Pong.

The story of the game might be called a cliched damsel-in-distress that is captured by a dragon and needed to be saved, a hero would step up to the challenge and tried to save the princess from apparent danger. That's where the adventurer Dirk the Daring and the princess Daphne would fit. The ending of the game itself is as predictable as one would read a princess in a fairytale story, Dirk slays the dragon, frees the princess and both of them lived happily ever after.

The castle, princess Daphne was confined here

The player would have control of Dirk in a few aspects, the controllers of the arcade machine consist of a joystick and a button for the sword. Dirk needs to perform specific movements at a specific time to proceed with the game, if a wrong button is pressed at the wrong time, the player would lose a life. For example, if a snake appears, the player should use their reflexes to press the sword button, killing the snake, else the snake kills Dirk. On the other hand, if there is a landslide on the right area of the screen, the player should move the joystick to the left, if the player moves to the right, the landslide kills Dirk.

A ghastly being appears, press the sword button to kill it!

Dragon's Lair can be classified as both a memory game and a trial-and-error puzzle solving game. The main challenge of this game is that the player wouldn't be able to finish the game on his/her first playthrough, the player would need to have a lot of memory on each stage pattern, what will come next and what button to press and when. The process might take a strenuous amount of time (I have played the game for at least 50 times, and yet I am still dying on the stupid bits of it), and will find people coming back for more to just see how would they fare against their previous self, getting a tiny tad further into the story each time. But believe me, it feels great to:

Turn this...

...into this!

Dragon's Lair received much of an impact that the game was ported into home entertainment system, some of which are: Floppy disks for PC and Apple Macintosh, Catridges for Commodore 64, Sega CD (Add-on to the Sega Genesis), Philips CD-i, Panasonic 3DO and more recently is available on a direct download from the PlayStation Network to both the PlayStation 3 and PlayStation Portable. The game has also spawned their own sequels and remakes, some notable series of the Dragon's Lair are:

Dragon's Lair on Nintendo Entertainment System (1990)

Dragon's Lair II (1991)

...and the newest so far: Dragon's Lair 3D (2002)

Whatever made Dragon's Lair famous (might it be the revolutionary graphics, the new take on the video gaming controls, or just plain overpriced machine on the arcade corner) made it to be well known to the world as it is now, Start your Questing!