Dragon's Lair game (walkthrough)
Dragon's Lair is a video game franchise created by Rick Dyer and Don Bluth, ex-Disney animator. 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 game was originally released for arcades in 1983 by Cinematronics. It used laserdisc technology, offering greatly superior graphics compared to other video games at the time. 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.
Players had five controls: up, down, left, right, and attack. Gameplay consists of reacting to on-screen button prompts which trigger pre-drawn success or failure animations, essentially a forerunner of the modern quick time event. A perfect run with no deaths lasts no more than 12 minutes. In total, the game has 22 minutes or 50,000 frames of animated footage, including individual death scenes and 'game over' screens.
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 While its graphics were once again praised, its now outdated and limited interactivity compared to the newer generation of arcade games kept it from reaching the popularity of the original.