Dragon's Lair

An old-fashioned dose of movie magic - but one that trades in a novel type of glamour

- CALLUM BAINS

Looking back at press coverage of the launch of Dragon’s Lair, you’d be forgiven for assuming that this arcade machine was about to change the course of gaming history. “Dragon’s Lair is as different from normal videogames as Space Invaders was to pinball,” declared one news report, between shots of wide-eyed teens craning for a glimpse of 1983’s hottest release. Artist and animation legend Don Bluth was no less audacious in his assessment, positing that his first foray into videogames had united “engineers and dramatists” in the arcade market for the very first time: “That’s why I think you’ll find something tremendously more exciting, something that will pull you into the screen like you haven’t been pulled before.”

Forty years later, it’s a claim that still holds water. The game’s hand-drawn animations were more expressive, fluid and detailed than the simple pixel sprites that filled arcades of the time. Where every object in Donkey Kong and Galaga was rendered in garish colours and orthogonal movements, the cartoon characters of Dragon’s Lair pranced about with the same grace and flair as those broadcast on television or shown in blockbuster films. Nothing looked quite like it, and even today, as games continue to trend towards highfidelity photorealism that dates much more quickly, it looks less like a relic of a graphically underpowered past than some apparently long-lost Disney film.