Dragons Lair The Adventure Continues is a video game franchise created by Rick Dyer. The series is famous for its Western animation-style graphics and complex decades-long history of being ported to many platforms and being remade into television and comic book series.
The first game in the series is titled Dragon’s Lair, originally released for arcades in 1983[1] by Cinematronics. It uses laserdisc technology, offering greatly superior graphics compared to other video games at the time.[2] The game was ported to several other platforms, but as no home system technology of that era could accommodate the graphical quality of LaserDisc, several abridged versions of the original game were released under different names.[3]
The first true sequel, Dragon’s Lair II: Time Warp, had started development as early as 1984, but would only appear in arcades in 1991. While its graphics were once again praised, its by-then outdated and limited interactivity compared to the newer generation of arcade games kept it from reaching the popularity of the original.[4]
Dragons Lair The Adventure Continues
The two main games in the series are considered gaming classics[5] and are frequently re-released for each new generation of consoles.[6] In 2010, they were bundled alongside the unrelated 1984 Bluth Group game Space Ace in the Dragon’s Lair Trilogy which was made available across numerous platforms.[6]
Dragons Lair The Adventure Continues
Forays into other media include a short lived animated series that aired on ABC in 1984 and a comic-book miniseries released in 2003. Plans for a feature-length film have existed since the 1980s and resurfaced in 2015, when Bluth launched two crowd-funding campaigns.[7] The Kickstarter campaign was unsuccessful[8] but the Indiegogo campaign reached its target in early 2016.[9]
Games – Dragons Lair The Adventure Continues
- Dragon’s Lair is a laserdisc video game published by Cinematronics in 1983.[10] In the game, the protagonist Dirk the Daring is a knight attempting to rescue Princess Daphne from the evil dragon Singe who has locked the princess in the foul wizard Mordroc’s castle. It featured animation by ex-Disney animator Don Bluth.
- Dragons Lair The Adventure Continues
- Most other games of the era represented the character as a sprite, which consisted of a series of pixels displayed in succession. Due to hardware limitations of the era, artists were greatly restricted in the detail they could achieve using that technique; the resolution, framerate, and number of frames were severely constrained.
- Dragons Lair The Adventure Continues
- Dragon’s Lair overcame those limitations by tapping into the vast storage potential of the LaserDisc but imposed other limitations on the actual gameplay. The game can freeze as the laserdisc searches for the correct scene to play, and the cabinets are difficult to maintain.[11] It was advertised as the first truly 3D video game and as the meeting point of video games and animated films.[12] Its success sparked numerous home ports, sequels, and related games.
- In the 21st century, it has been repackaged in a number of formats (such as for the iPhone) as a “retro” or historic game. It is currently one of only three video games (along with Pong and Pac-Man) in storage at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.[13][dubious – discuss]
- Dragons Lair The Adventure Continues
- In 1988 Readysoft started development of conversion of the game for 16-bit machines. The development was done on Amiga and due to many compromises concerning limited memory and a slow, small external storage device, the game was released in 1989 with only 15% of the scenes of the arcade original. In 1990 Amiga version was ported to Atari ST and MS-DOS. (source: Retro Gamer 38)
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Bonus Track: Dragon’s Legend (performed by Koto)
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Playthrough (Spanish Version)
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