Dragon’s Lair Overhaul Black Edition (1/16th scale)

https://newwavetoys.com/products/dragons-lair-x-replicade-overhaul-black

by sys32768 • 3 years ago

63 48 3 years ago

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pupppet• 3 years ago

The intro is burned into my brain, they always seemed to turn up the volume on Dragon’s Lair the loudest in the arcade.

vjulian• 3 years ago

Yes, and Space Ace. And I loved them both.

oneoff786• 3 years ago

How did this game work? It seems like it was a QTE game with no prompts. Why was it popular?

chowells2• 3 years ago

According to a random Wikipedia article I found, in 1983 the three top-grossing arcade games were Ms. Pac-Man, Pole Position, and Dragon's Lair. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983_in_video_games

Compare the graphics of those three games. Dragon's Lair was groundbreaking, even if the gameplay was quite limited to account for technological and budgetary limitations.

leereeves• 3 years ago

That's not quite the same thing as popularity. Dragon's Lair was very expensive per minute of gameplay, so it didn't have to be popular to make a lot of money.

pessimizer• 3 years ago

Because Don Bluth cartoons are awesome, especially the tons of death scenes animated for this game. Whenever someone made it to a screen that I hadn't seen, I was absolutely giddy and filled with dread over what was about to kill him. The game was bad and consisted of guessing when you should press buttons. Skill was gained through memory and constant application of quarters.

m463• 3 years ago

the tons of death scenes

lol, this is what I remember. I seem to remember turning into a skeleton many times (or ways?).

qbasic_forever• 3 years ago

It was laserdisc based with full motion animation graphics. It looked and sounded like _nothing_ else in the arcade. The best graphics in other games at the time were things like Donkey Kong and Ms. Pac Man (i.e. cutesy low resolution pixels and beeps/bloops of sound). Dragons Lair was awe inspiring--you were _controlling_ a real cartoon, like what you might have dreamed of doing while watching cartoons on TV.

There were prompts FYI, the button you needed to press would quickly flash and you had fractions of a second to smash it. The whole point of the game was kind of to infer the right action from what was happening on screen too, i.e. if a skeleton is swinging a sword at you then you probably want to jump away from them but not into a nearby pit.

tmountain• 3 years ago

The “prompt” was a very very brief yellow flash on the periphery of the screen in the direction you were supposed to move the joystick. I tried it a few times as a kid but was far too poor to get past the first one or two prompts. The visuals were mind boggling and the gameplay was abysmal, so my friends and I would usually just stare at the demo reel before moving on to a game that would stretch our quarters farther (gauntlet, tmnt, street fighter, etc). Ah, those were the days…!

CharlesW2• 3 years ago

It seems like it was a QTE game with no prompts.

I believe Dragon's Lair was the first QTE-style game, or at least the first popular one.

Also, Princess Daphne needed my help, dude.

libraryatnight2• 3 years ago

My memory of it is that it looked amazing. It still does. It's a Don Bluth cartoon short, more or less. But the game itself was frustrating and terrible. Even on easy you had to really nail the inputs or instantly die.

It looked so good that even after I learned it was a waste of quarters as a kid, I still occasionally would get baited into playing. I remember the last time I played it was at a restaurant waiting for a table, there was an anteroom before the bar with a cocktail table Pac-Man and Dragon's Lair. After about 20 minutes of waiting I actually thought... "What if it's not bad, what if the machines I tried before were just faulty or abused." as I watched the intro loop from across the room. Nope, same anguish.

cmgbhm• 3 years ago

You’ve summarized my memories of encountering this game at showbiz often. I loved the art.

I remember looking it up in college https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/gbc/436660-dragons-lair/faqs/1... and realizing there’s no way I would have ever remembered all that.

https://youtu.be/hdumVFgwgP8 is the complete run. I so wanted to like it. Fortunately that style didn’t survive often.

brandall102• 3 years ago

No offense, but it's amazing to me the appeal of something like this wouldn't be clearly evident given the time it was released. That game and other similar QTE types of that era give me chills whenever I see one in an arcade still. It seemed like something out of the future. It's one of those things of that era so vibrant that it goes hand in hand with things like ET or Thriller as being especially exciting and memorable.

Part of it was the Secret of Nimh connection... unsure if the film was a huge success, but it definitely left a mark on that period of time. To have a game in that animation style, with a hilarious premise, incredible sound system, etc, was a complete sensory overload against the pixellated mess that surrounded it.

I remember seeing it the first time during summer of '83 on a family trip to Vegas. They carved out a section with a platform in the middle arcade at the Flamingo Hilton, there must have been 50 people just watching whomever was playing it.

From what I recall it was also the first game to cost 50 cents, and you would have to wait an hour or more in line for the honor maybe during the first few months if your arcade was so lucky to have a machine. I remember the first I was able to play it without waiting, must have been around Christmas that year.

zxcvbn40382• 3 years ago

At my local arcade it was months before I could even get close enough to touch the controls. There were always thirty to sixty people waiting to play. They rigged an external tv so people in the crowd could watch. I never saw another game generate that kind of interest.

giantrobot• 3 years ago

The game's video was full motion NTSC video. It played off a LaserDisc inside the cabinet. Because LaserDiscs have direct access capabilities, when the game needed to play a scene it was just giving the player a time index to play. The logic of the game was keeping track of the current playhead and was expecting certain input at certain timestamps, some element on the screen or the action button would flash and you'd have a fraction of a second to hit the button or the joystick in the right direction. If you didn't you died and the game played one of the many death animations.

It was...fun in that it was a gorgeous game compared to other games in the arcade. Unfortunately it usually cost like a dollar in quarters for a single play. You only had two or three lives (I can't remember exactly) and the reaction time was very brief and unforgiving.

This was a time when the typical arcade game was a quarter for a few lives and if you were good you could get tens of minutes (or more) of play out of a quarter. It wasn't until years later with the home release that I even saw even halfway through the game. I've never once seen anyone get further than a quarter of the way through the game in an adcade.

csa• 3 years ago

I've never once seen anyone get further than a quarter of the way through the game in an adcade.

Beating the dragon in the arcade was a complete rush. People watching were thoroughly entertained.

Honestly, I think it was more fun to watch than to play.

brandall102• 3 years ago

Believe it or not I saw someone beat it fairly early on, maybe within 2-3 months, and the crowd was absolutely freaking out when the dragon appeared w/ Daphne in the crystal ball. Not having the internet around at the time I imagine most people thought it was un-winnable.

Interestingly enough, while I didn't get particularly far in Dragon's Lair I actually beat Cliff Hanger and got to the final stages of Space Ace. Not much but they seemed a bit more forgiving.

pmarreck2• 3 years ago

gen x'er here saying the obvious "I guess you had to be there" ;)

it was the first QTE game, the first animated game with full NTSC laserdisc graphics, the first game to cost 50 cents to play, and just watching someone else play was entertaining enough so the cabinet ALWAYS had a crowd of people around it.

The only other time I regularly saw such a crowd around a single arcade cabinet was when Mortal Kombat came out while I was in college.

If you look at other popular arcade games of this era and what they had to offer graphically and sound-wise, you may start to see the appeal of a fully animated controllable game with a movie soundtrack.

Most Gen X gamers' memories of this game entail the (also entertaining) death animations. Because it was also FUCKING hard, lol. The hinting of QTE games today is positively luxurious compared to Dragons' Lair.

I think it's hilarious that the Daphne emulator has to actually simulate the playback-head delay of the (now nonexistent) laserdisc player to get the timings right, lol. Like it literally has to have a model of the disc itself in its emulation so it can estimate how long it would have taken the playback head to get from wherever it is virtually to wherever it is supposed to go virtually because the game incorporated these delays into its gameplay and simply supplying the right video data as soon as it is requested in naive emulation would make it work too fast, lol

prox• 3 years ago

What’s interesting is that for instance in Taiwan it’s still big (arcades) , I follow an IRL streamer who goes there every now and then.

footlose_3815• 3 years ago

This has released before, really janky little thing. It was worth playing in the 80s/90s, but just watch it on Youtube now...

CharlesW2• 3 years ago

FWIW: "…a redesign of our original 1/6th scale Dragon’s Lair x RepliCade with exclusive features and updates including: a more powerful processor to enable HDTV screen mirroring…"

libraryatnight2• 3 years ago

Dragon's Lair in general is more fun to watch than play, it's so nice to look at even after I knew it was a waste of quarters I'd still occasionally get baited into playing it.

jimjimjim• 3 years ago

DL and space ace could demolish a pocket full of coins

trynewideas• 3 years ago

Headline's wrong. It's 1/6 scale, not 1/16.

bredren• 3 years ago

In case anyone else was wondering, to make it a Dragon’s Lair arcade for ants, it would need to be 1/2000 scale.

https://www.quora.com/If-humans-where-the-size-of-an-ant-how...

innocentoldguy2• 3 years ago

I had a chance to buy this when there were 19 left, but hesitated at the 1/16th scale description on HN, which seemed kind of small. By the time I figured out it was 1/6th scale, they were all gone. Oh well.

Damogran6• 3 years ago

For a hot minute, this amazing, lazerdisk, Fifty Cents a Play game off my youth, was $2 and a 2 Gb download for your PHONE.

(okay, it's still $4.99, but if anything demonstrates Moore's Law better, feel free to share it.)

abrookewood• 3 years ago

This machine single-handedly destroyed my holiday allowance as a child.

exogeny• 3 years ago

I was too young for DL but I absolutely remember its cousin, the hologram-driven Time Traveler [0]. It blew me away when I saw it in my local arcade, but I don't remember it being a good game at all. Most of my quarters at that time (1991-1992) were going to ST:TNG pinball, Outrunners/Virtua Racing, and STUN Runner.

Also worth a mention here is this kickass Italo remix of DL themes and samples [1] by Koto.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Traveler_(video_game) 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HRffez98uYY

toast02• 3 years ago

Time Traveler and the hologram fighting game were both pretty bad. You were definitely pumping the quarters into the right machines.

BizarroLand• 3 years ago

They were terrible for gameplay but playing that as a kid was the first time I had ever seen a hologram and I don't regret the $2 it took from me.

I wish more games would use the technology. It's got to be public domain by this point.

psyclobe• 3 years ago

They need a human to scale in the photos or something

kqr2• 3 years ago

https://www.reddit.com/r/BananasForScale/

khazhoux• 3 years ago

This and Space Ace were my favorites. The audio is forever etched into my brain.

4RealFreedom• 3 years ago

Agreed. I could pick the audio from either out of a noisy room.

CodeWriter23• 3 years ago

The cool kids pronounced it “Dragon Slayer”

Maursault• 3 years ago

Maybe there's some nostalgia value here, and although this game was innovative in that it used video disc to display unbelievable eye-popping graphics compared to video games of its era, as a video game it absolutely sucked, was not fun, play was too short, options astoundingly limited, and ultimately it was a ridiculous waste of quarters. But whatever makes people happy.

mixmastamyk2• 3 years ago

Dragon's Lair: The fantasy adventure where you become a valiant knight, on a quest to rescue the fair princess from the clutches of an evil dragon. You control the actions of a daring adventurer, finding his way through the castle of a dark wizard, who has enchanted it with treacherous monsters and obstacles. In the mysterious caverns below the castle, your odyssey continues against the awesome forces that oppose your efforts to reach the Dragon's Lair. Lead on, adventurer. Your quest awaits!

zxcvbn40382• 3 years ago

That is drilled into my skull right next to “apply directly to the head” and “where’s the beef?!”

mixmastamyk2• 3 years ago

Yup, can even hear the guy’s voice.

squarefoot• 3 years ago

I think I played Dragon's Lair just one time, and never played Space Ace; they were gorgeous to look at, let alone the fantastic audio, but I didn't find interesting games where one had essentially zero control on what the character was doing, and all it needed was pushing the right button at the right time. There were much more compelling games at the time, and I thanked both DL and SA for grabbing other players away from them at the arcade:^)

thread hijack: one game I liked a lot in the mid 80s but don't recall the name and failed to find later as retro emulated, assuming it does exist as such, is that one fantasy style platform in which a character fights in a dungeon against various creatures, one of which is a flying manta. Unfortunately I don't recall other details, but for some reasons I liked the flying manta a lot, probably because at the time I did some scuba diving with my father and always wanted to see one live, but that would have been impossible in our sea.

innocentoldguy2• 3 years ago

I liked Dragon's Lair and played it quite often, but my favorite of the laserdisc video games was "Cliff Hanger," which used footage from two Lupin III films. It mostly used footage from the Hayao Miyazaki movie The Castle of Cagliostro, but included footage from The Mystery of Mamo as well.

oweiler• 3 years ago

Absolutely hated that game, graphics couldn't make up for it. I still don't get why it has such a huge fan base.

davtho• 3 years ago

The amount of wasted quarters this make me remember...

Dragon’s Lair Overhaul Black Edition (1/16th scale)

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