Laserdiscs! Have you seen one? Do you know what it is? A few years ago my answers would have been no and no, but it turns out that they were a thing for a while, particularly in parts of Asia. To get abbreviation-heavy for moment, they were a sort of LP-sized-CD predecessor to DVD. And the laserdisc was also crucial to the production of a groundbreaking game.
Originally an arcade game in 1983, Dragon’s Lair was an early example of that perennial, questionable innovation – the ‘interactive movie’. In this case it was an interactive animation, an impressive looking tale of a hero, a dragon and (sigh) princess-rescuing. It looked impressive enough to get away with charging twice the normal price per play. The laserdisc allowed the storage and playback of big media files, but didn’t lend itself so well to constant interaction, and so players were limited to making specific inputs at specific points. In the context of a big wow moment in an arcade, even limited interactivity with a cliched cartoon was enough.
The success of the good-looking but empty I can understand. The mystery is how we then end up with Dragon’s Lair at #1 in the UK home game charts several years later. Arcade conversions doing well on the Spectrum were nothing new, as the rest of 1986 has demonstrated. Arcade conversions which looked nothing like the original game doing well on the Spectrum were nothing new. Yet the idea of an arcade conversion which looked nothing like the original game doing well when how the original game looked was the entire point of it is more confounding.
Wasn’t it apparent to Spectrum players that this game would, almost by definition, be useless? Were there a lot of people who had heard that Dragon’s Lair was really good but knew nothing else about it? Was bloody-minded determination that the machine you had bought would be the right one for everything out there decisive?
The only answer which makes much sense to me is one we’ve come across before: style. Dragon’s Lair on the Spectrum cannot possibly hope to compete with the original version. Still, though, it doesn’t look like a typical Spectrum game either. It sacrifices any hope of a smooth playing experience to make sure it doesn’t, needing near-constant cassette loading for progress, although it’s so stupidly difficult as to make that academic for most. Its cartoon look, everything big on the screen and in blocks of colour, looks distinctive and impressive, and extends to parts where you have at least minimal control. The cinematic fall-to-doom sequence when you lose in the opening tower is strikingly different from anything else around. Marvelling at it doesn’t last when you’re seeing it for the twentieth time in three minutes, and stuck watching the same skeleton bit afterwards too, but first impressions count. This is a game which is a failure in almost every way, but as a very first impression for a Spectrum player, Dragon’s Lair is a heroic success.
