
Dragon’s Lair – An Arcade Story - jatoben
http://stevenf.com/2014/05/21/arcade-story/
======
nasalgoat
Being of the same vintage as the author, I have an arcade story that is
somewhat similar.

My step-father was a full time employee of the Canadian National Exhibition in
Toronto, and back then one of the perks was that all family members received a
free admission pass for the duration of the fair, which was 20 days.

There was an arcade located at the end of midway and being on summer vacation,
I would of course go to the CNE every day and play videogames. Specifically
one obscure Atari game called Food Fight.

I spent a solid two weeks mastering that game, which for those who are
unfamiliar has a very high twitch factor and a never-ending wave progression
similar to Robotron.

For those two weeks I simply could not crack the top five scores on the
machine. I spent hours, and my entire allowance, trying again and again to get
that high score.

Finally, on the second last day of the fair, I did it. I had been playing for
at least a solid 30 minutes and although I didn't get a crowd of a dozen, I
had a couple of people watching. When I lost my last man and found I had
reached the high score, I felt triumphant - like I had really accomplished
something amazing and important. I left the machine aglow.

Then, on the last day of the fair, I returned to the arcade to bask in my
glory, only to discover they'd wiped the high scores the previous night. I was
so heartbroken I didn't even play to try and regain my title.

I now have a modest collection of videogames and pinball machines, one of
which is Food Fight. I'm 30 years older and my reflexes aren't what they used
to be, so I will probably never regain that score again, but it's nice to fire
it up and return to 1984 occasionally.

~~~
sandymcm
I first played Food Fight at a convenience store near my high school. Went
back to class after lunch and tried to explain the game to a friend. When I
was done he said something I've since called Smerek's Law (named after him):
"You can't describe a video game without sounding like an idiot."

------
bane
A lot of people rag on Dragon's Lair (and similar) for being "just a pretty
movie with occasional interaction" instead of a game. But modern games are
full of Quick Time Events (QTE)s which are spiritually the exact same thing.

(I still have the announcer's voice calling out "DRAGON'S LAIR!" in the
attract mode seared in my memory).

> We were staying in a hotel or motel, and it was either attached to or had a
> small arcade of its own.

For people who didn't grow up during the 80s arcade boom. Arcades where
_everywhere_. It was basically expected that every place that sold anything
would have at least 1 arcade game. Grocery store? Check. Tanning Salon? Sure
thing. Strip mall? Why, they'll have 2 complete deluxe arcades.

It was a looooong time from the death of Arcades to modern smart phones before
we had something to do while hanging around most stores again.

The gathering crowd around an awesome play of a game really did happen back
then. It's like the scene from Tron where Flynn is playing in his arcade. It
was _actually_ like that.

My older brother could play epic multi-hour long games of some kind of game I
can't remember the name to (I think it was Pengo), racking up so many extra
men that he could go for a bathroom break mid-game and let some scruffy novice
kid (usually me) break in and play at the advanced levels for a couple
minutes. The convenience store he played in would be packed with 20 or 30
people watching history happen. It gave every small town a local hero they
could cheer for and every local hero felt like a minor god for the length of
their quarter.

~~~
rodgerd
> But modern games are full of Quick Time Events (QTE)s which are spiritually
> the exact same thing.

And it's a terrible, terrible thing.

~~~
partomniscient
Unless you turn them up to 11, and end up with Street Fighter and similar
games, where it mixes twitch reactions with tactical strategy and rote
memorisation no longer helps if you go into P vs P instead of P vs Game AI.

That being said, my possibly flawed memory of those fighting games spiritual
predecessor was a karate game which had 2 joysticks and no buttons for a
single player to use.

~~~
lectrick
> 2 joysticks

You must be talking about Karate Champ. STILL a fun game when played against
someone else!

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karate_Champ](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karate_Champ)

~~~
partomniscient
That's it. Hazy memory is hazy.... I think I played it a bit and came to the
conclusion that it was too expensive for me to learn. Most of my pitiful
allowance went into things like Ghosts 'n Goblins or vertical scrolling shoot-
em-ups. To get back on topic: Dragon's Lair value for money was even more
abysmal locally for me - {hazy, contrived memory warning} - I put the money in
and before I died, moved the joystick 28 times and hit the buttons 8 times,
but I lasted 3 minutes.

That's roughly equivalent to a few seconds of player input for 1942 or Galaga.
Pretty, but not particularly fulfilling.

For the young and poor, Dragon's Lair was indeed a great game to watch other
people play.

------
soneca
What a nice story. My two highlights:

 _A local arcade not far from where we lived regularly put old games up for
sale. My dad noticed that they had listed a Space Ace cabinet for $300. To
this day I will never forget my shock — my dad bought it and brought it into
our tiny apartment. I had a full-size, real-deal Space Ace arcade cabinet in
my childhood bedroom._

Wow! Father of the decade for him!

and...

 _With all of these people watching, I played through the final scene of
Dragon’s Lair, but with a twist. I didn’t make the last move of the game
(sword button, which kills the dragon) allowing myself to get incinerated by
his fire breath four times. Not only did this ratchet up the crowd tension to
palpable levels, it also increased my score higher than if I had simply beaten
the game on the first try.

Then, with the crowd on tenterhooks — will he win? Does he really know how? —
on that last life, I played all the way through to the end. I pressed the
sword button then literally turned around and walked away, while the remaining
10-15 (non-interactive) seconds or so of the game played out. Like the nerd
version of the world’s greatest hip-hop act dropping the mic and walking off
stage, I just walked away from the game. I’d made the last move. Nothing left
for me here. Seen this all before._

What a diva!! :) I don't know the rationale for this, but I feel really happy
whenever I see these glory moments that _unimportant_ hobbies, usually
videogame or sports, provide for children and teens.

~~~
CodeMage
> _I don 't know the rationale for this, but I feel really happy whenever I
> see these glory moments that unimportant hobbies, usually videogame or
> sports, provide for children and teens._

That's because you know that seriously applying the "unimportant" to a hobby
is bullshit and feel vindicated whenever someone reasserts the original
meaning and motivation behind having a hobby in the first place :)

Or at least that's _my_ reason for feeling the same way you do ;)

------
steveklabnik
I actually have played a video game to a crowd of thousands of people. The
finals of a Guitar Hero tournament were on stage at Family Values Tour. I
can't find reliable attendance numbers from Pittsburgh in 2007, but the venue
had 23,000 seats. Well, the lawn doesn't have seats, you know what I mean.

I was pretty good at Guitar Hero. I recently checked, and I'm still 8,884th on
Guitar Hero II for XBox Live, out of 2.3 million. So when I heard this
tournament was happening, I was in. I spent hours practicing extra hard. First
round was at a local bar, and you had to be the Nth caller to the local radio
station to get a spot. Through some persistence, I made it happen. Lots of the
people weren't even that great, one guy had never even played before. I ended
up winning that pretty handily. They held a ton more of these preliminary
tournaments, and then 16 (I think) of us got free tickets to the tour. Woo!

Showing up, there was a tent where people could play Guitar Hero. We held
another elimination tournament there, with the top two facing off on main
stage. A friend that I knew from the competitive Guitar Hero forums and I had
both brought cheat sheets with the optimal star power patterns on them. Such
nerds. We were the only ones who did, and we pretty handily wiped up everyone
else.

So, he and I got to play "Killing in the Name" by Rage Against the Machine on
main stage, winner got a real guitar and to hang out with Korn. Of course,
said friend (who now works on C# for Microsoft, actually...) was even better
than I was, and solidly beat me. Oh well. It was still super amazing.

From time to time I find an arcade machine (they made them for Guitar Hero II)
in the wild, and once or twice I've gotten a little crowd. Mostly from kids. I
can totally emphasize with the end of the article, it is pretty exhilarating.

------
Tiktaalik
The story of sending away for a guide to this opaque game is pretty funny. I'd
never heard of that.

I have heard however that with a similarly difficult and opaque game, Tower of
Druaga, it was not uncommon in Japan to find a little box next to the machine
where you'd find a collectively created strategy guide. Gamers at the arcade
would add to the knowledge of what worked and what didn't in order to pass
each level of the game. It was a sort of early strategy wiki.

------
brandnewlow
Dragon's Lair is a beautiful game and can be had on Steam for a $10:
[http://store.steampowered.com/app/227380/](http://store.steampowered.com/app/227380/)

I too used to love exploring arcades and had a similar experience with a crowd
forming to watch me beat Killer Instinct in an arcade in northern Italy. I
think he's dead-on that the rush you get from those experiences is similar to
what people find on Twitch.

~~~
incision
_> 'I too used to love exploring arcades and had a similar experience with a
crowd forming to watch me beat Killer Instinct in an arcade in northern
Italy.'_

Absolutely.

Personally, I have two periods of magical arcade memories.

First, the completely enveloping, holodeck-esque wonder of climbing into or
onto just about any deluxe cabinet[1][2][3][4] as a kid in the smoky arcades
of the 80s.

Later, the big communities around the 'quarters on the glass' era of fighting
games when the local arcade was effectively a close-knit dojo - storming,
challenge matches and all.

Online play has come a long way and Evo [5] keeps the highest levels of comp
alive, but the world has changed in ways that make that have likely ended
those old, physically rooted communities and networks for good.

1: [http://www.arcade-
museum.com/images/118/118124217270.gif](http://www.arcade-
museum.com/images/118/118124217270.gif)

2: [http://www.arcade-museum.com/images/108/1088284893.jpg](http://www.arcade-
museum.com/images/108/1088284893.jpg)

3: [http://www.arcade-
museum.com/images/118/118124211046.jpg](http://www.arcade-
museum.com/images/118/118124211046.jpg)

4: [http://www.arcade-museum.com/images/122/1223249015.jpg](http://www.arcade-
museum.com/images/122/1223249015.jpg)

5:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_Championship_Series](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_Championship_Series)

~~~
bane
> Later, the big communities around the 'quarters on the glass' era of
> fighting games when the local arcade was effectively a close-knit dojo -
> storming, challenge matches and all.

Something I always thought was interesting from that time (I spent High School
on Street Fighter II and a bit too much College on Tekken Tag Tournament). Was
how the culture in different arcades was always a bit different. The play-
styles, how the impromptu tournaments worked, what was considered cheap or
fair play...it always interested me as your home arcade group think eventually
set a kind of style momentum and mixing it up or discovering new techniques
was always kind of a challenge. If you were really dedicated to the game you'd
go over to the next city or wherever they had one of the games and spend a day
or two there learning from the group think in that arcade.

------
donretag
I occasionally play Dragon's Lair when I am at the Santa Cruz Boardwalk.
Thanks to the wonders of inflation and my status of being a wage-earning
adult, the frustration of "lasting for about 2 minutes before losing all five
lives" is no longer a concern. Another quarter? Why not. Still, it is
unbelievably frustrating.

I miss arcades.

~~~
ekianjo
If you miss arcades you should visit Japan (especially Tokyo) there are still
a few living arcade with very decent collections. But you better hurry, every
year one of the old ones ends up shutting down, I'm not sure how many will be
left 5 years down the road...

------
ekianjo
I saw Dragon's Lair running for the first time on Amiga when I was something
like 9 years old. This was a complete shock because it featured full motion
animation and it was running from floppy disks! This feat was achieved by
using polygons instead of bitmaps, to save memory space. This gave the idea a
few years later to Eric Chahi to use polygons instead of bitmaps for his new
me Another World which would become an immediate hit as well... leading to the
game Flashback (from a different creator) reusing the same technique, and the
adventure game Cruise for a Corpse as well, making the game company Delphine
Software very rich in the process.

There are tons of fun stories when one starts talking about Dragon's Lair.

~~~
the_af
I'm pretty sure Dragon's Lair used bitmaps even for the Amiga version.
However, you deserve an upvote just for mentioning the awesome Eric Chahi,
whose wonderful game Another World (aka Out of this World) indeed used
polygons. Still one of my favorites games ever.

~~~
ekianjo
Turns out you were right, it used compressed bitmaps. But the inspiration
piece for Eric Chahi was correct:

> ERIC CHAHI: The polygon idea came from playing the Dragon's Lair port for
> the Amiga, which was showing incredible big animation on the screen, thanks
> to Randy Linden. That game's graphics weren't polygons, but were compressed
> bitmaps directly read from the disk. This was revolutionary for the time.

> I thought it could be done with polygons since the animation was flat. I
> wrote a vectorial code and programmed some speed tests. The idea was to use
> polygons not only for movie like animation but also for gameplay sequences.
> Think of the sprites as an assemblage of vector shapes. This proved to be a
> major advantage because you had big sprites that were scalable which took up
> less disk space than traditional sprites.

See this interview:
[http://eboredom.20m.com/features/interviews/chahi.html](http://eboredom.20m.com/features/interviews/chahi.html)

Another World is also one of my favorite games. I still remember the day in
1991 when I played it for the first time.

~~~
reedlaw
A polygon-based game engine still sounds like a great idea. Are there any
similar, modern examples?

~~~
0x0
Well, most 3d engines work by drawing triangles :)

~~~
ekianjo
I guess he referred to 2D polygon-based game engines :) Which is actually
taken care by 3D game engines anyway nowadays, since it's a subset of it.

~~~
lomnakkus
I know your post was tongue-in-cheek, but it's not _quite_ that simple, I
think. For one thing the design aesthetic is almost completely different -- if
look at the (awesome!) Another World[1] there is very little in the form of
shading and such. It's much more like an old-school cartoon than an actual
realistic rendering -- which is what most 3D games (and cartoons!) tend to
strive towards these days.

EDIT: Btw, IIRC this is the _only_ game that I ever played where I didn't
actually realize when it had started. The intro -> gameplay transition is so
seamless that I didn't even notice it. Pure genius.

[1] Just in case you haven't had the chance to experience it first-hand.
Here's a play-through video:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zgkf6wooDmw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zgkf6wooDmw)

------
cowmix
I've always, always hated Dragon's Lair.

I hated how people would marvel at the "great graphics!" I hated how
unreliable the game was (it was always broken -- the stupid laser disc).

I liked it as a movie... but it was lame as a game.

~~~
mynameishere
Everybody hated it. Apparently this guy was also an animation fan, so maybe
that explains the discrepency. Still, it was better than the worst game every
made, which was essentially the same but with actors:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Traveler_%28video_game%29](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Traveler_%28video_game%29)

...and it often cost a _dollar_ to play.

~~~
the_af
I remember Time Traveler! It used some sort of hologram display, or a similar
illusion. I always watched someone else play it, because it was too expensive,
and for me that money was better spent in a beat 'em up where I could last
longer.

Didn't know it was an awful game, but it doesn't surprise me...

------
po
If Dragon's Lair were created today, they would print the commands you're
supposed to press on the top of each screen (similar to rhythm games). There
is enough difficulty in getting the timing right that it would still be
difficult and people would feed in more quarters. Maybe there would be an
'expert mode' to remove the command hints and get an alternate ending.

~~~
reedlaw
I remember the Amiga version would flash a light in the direction you were
supposed to go, or in the case of the sword, make the sword glow. It was
enough of a clue to get through many scenes, but often required too quick of a
reaction to pass on the first go.

~~~
egypturnash
This was in the original version, too.

------
gillianseed
Great story, never got the chance to play Dragon's Lair on the arcade, but I
did get to play Space Ace, the art/animation was amazing as one would expect
from Don Bluth, particularly from that era when he did his (imo) finest work
in the form of Secret of Nimh, but the simplistic game play mechanics left me
disappointed.

As I recall, Don Bluth saw these laser games as simply a means to raise funds
for his true love, animated feature films, meanwhile the producer Rick Dyer
was truly passionate about the laserdisc game format and spent pretty much
every penny of his Dragon's Lair and Space Ace earnings on his ill-fated
Halcyon project.

------
jcr
What a great story. Dragon's Lair and the other early Laser Disc games were an
interesting advancement; the gameplay was infuriating but the graphics were
amazing. For the price of bad gameplay (and a lot of quarters), we got a
glimpse of the kind of graphics work we would find in future games.

A lot of the (currently 30) comments here are about the audience factor in
video games. There's nothing quite like drawing a crowd in an arcade. The
arcades may be mostly gone, but the effects of an audience in video games is
still being studied. I spotted some related work in the ACM CHI 2014
proceedings:

ACM CHI 2014: "Audience Experience in Social Videogaming: Effects of Turn
Expectation and Game Physicality"

Thirty Second Demo Video with paper Abstract:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HuQkCfjWZzc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HuQkCfjWZzc)

ACM CHI 2014 Citation (Paper Paywall):
[http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=2556288.2556965](http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=2556288.2556965)

Paper:
[http://static.squarespace.com/static/52455e03e4b0804b7e27b03...](http://static.squarespace.com/static/52455e03e4b0804b7e27b031/t/535d5c6be4b0e268e3ea5dfb/1398627435120/2014-CHI-
AudienceExperience.pdf)

------
danso
This story put a smile on my face, even though I'm not of the Dragon's Lair
Era. But I lived through the original Street Fighter 2, which was well before
the death of the arcade and the prevalence of Internet tipsheets. As much as
gaming has advanced since then, I still miss the thrill of having a line of 10
people in our small town arcade waiting their turn to take me on as E Honda.

------
mrev19
I love this story I would have been so pumped to have seen that. You were a
lord.

I had that experience you describe of only seeing certain games randomly,
round about 89-90ish I think. 'Sin Star'. I only saw it one arcade on a trip,
once, where I played it for 8 hours, it just blew me away. I spent years after
that asking around, could never find it again, or anyone who had ever played
it.

Another thing that I carry with me from that time is just how mind melting
Defender was when it showed up. That game will always be the high water mark
for me. I remember just staring at the controls for so long with my friends,
just terrified. I remember the day first hearing that someone we knew had
actually played it. We didn't believe it, we didn't think it was actually
possible. But then of course it became THE game.

Hitting the arcade with $10 in quarters was just like, I can die now thank you
very much

~~~
pyrocat
You're probably thinking of
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinistar](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinistar)
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S-XEINagmaU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S-XEINagmaU)

~~~
mrev19
OH HELL YES!!!!

Holy crap the internet is AMAZING!!!!!!

I seriously asked everyone i came within two feet of about that game for
freakin years, and NO ONE ever know what I was going on about was like I'd
seen a unicorn. Realise now must have been 84-85

I filed that away as some sort of weird delusion I was doomed to forever live
the memory of alone until this very moment good god a 30 year reconciliation
this is last starfighter-level mind blowing shit over here

~~~
Kronopath
Sinistar is an arcade classic. I played it a few years ago at a retro arcade
event and really liked it. You can download it yourself if you grab the MAME
arcade emulator—but in all honesty, I think this is one of those games that
works _much_ better in its original arcade incarnation. It even had a custom
_49-way_ joystick…

~~~
joezydeco
And let's not forget RJ Mical, one of the programmers of Sinistar, who
eventually helped design the Amiga computer and the Atari Lynx.

------
fit2rule
The Arcades of the 80's were massive computer rooms. I was privileged to have
known a few elder programmers/hardware hackers, arcade owners in the 80's, who
had no issues with us kids (well, family friends) ripping cabinets apart and
being involved in re-programming things. As a kid, they were my guru's. It was
a wonderful time to be willing to stay up late, hack on code, and see new
things up on the screen .. two battlezone cabs wired up for multiplayer,
infinite lives on things, &etc. well okay, the social aspect was terrific as
well. The local arcades attracted a lot of people .. so sitting in the
backroom with the change-counters and dead/living cabinet bits hacking code
could be reprieved with a sudden blast of humanity.

Good times.

Nowadays I watch people ignore/blowup each other with their eyephones and
instead of change-counters its appstore credit...

------
breadbox
Oh jeez -- Thayer's Quest. That game was a complete money sink. A quarter only
bought you time, and there was no such thing as a skip-ahead button, so just
getting through the opening cutscene ate up most of your first quarter. I
spent so much money getting all the way to the end of that game ... only to
discover that it ended at a cliffhanger. A final screen announced that Part II
was in the works, but they never actually made it, presumably because the
first one did so poorly.

I was all in favor of seeing adventure games break out of their text-only mold
(this was years before Myst), which is chiefly why I gave the game a chance in
the first place, but Thayer's Quest was a poor exemplar.

~~~
antimagic
Well, there were plenty of graphics-based adventure games before Must, such as
all of the Sierra games, like King's Quest, Space Quest, Leisure Suit Larry,
etc. After that, there were all of the LucasArts SCUMM-based games, before
Myst arrived on the scene.

Myst brought two new things to the genre - quicktime movies embedded in-game
to make things come to life far more vividly, and the inability to pick things
up - a constraint that generally lead to problems being more logical than had
typically been the case for adventure games.

~~~
breadbox
It wasn't really the graphics that I was referring to as much as being in a
video game arcade. I wanted to see adventure games break out into the
mainstream.

------
marban
I remember considering the purchase of a third and fourth floppy drive for the
Amiga to handle the eight disk set. Great box (art) by the way.

~~~
paulrademacher
The 3 second audio loop while loading from disk is seared into my brain!

~~~
snarfy
And I thought I had forgotten it.

------
lowken10
I had my own story of glory. I was in college (1996) and I was in the downtown
college bar/club strip. It was at the very beginning of my college career and
I hadn't made friends yet. Anyway there was an old Galaga game and I started
playing.

I employed the tick that makes it so enemies can't fire.

I then proceeded to play to a very high level. Well a bunch of people say me
playing and were so impressed at how far I was getting int he game. They
didn't realize that I had employed the "trick".

I was cool moment and I felt like a star for just a brief moment.

~~~
FroshKiller
Here is a great explanation of the glitch and instructions for patching it:
[http://www.computerarcheology.com/wiki/wiki/Arcade/Galaga](http://www.computerarcheology.com/wiki/wiki/Arcade/Galaga)

------
sramsay
I remember Dragon's Lair. For me, it went:

Quarter, quarter, death, death, death, death, death.

Couldn't have taken more than a minute. I would definitely have been the one
standing behind this guy watching in awe.

~~~
sosborn
Same here. It became the first game I avoided simply because I knew I would be
wasting my money.

------
tieTYT
> Maybe that’s what streaming games on Twitch is like for the current
> generation of kids. But even knowing that 60 people from around the world
> are watching you set new records in Call of Duty, I wonder how it stacks up
> to an actual crowd of people standing directly behind you, as you listen to
> them whispering to each other about how good this kid is at this game.

This is still the case depending on the genre. If you go to a fighting game
tournament (street fighter, tekken, soul calibur, etc.) you fight in person
because at a high level the lag over the internet is not acceptable for
competitive play. In that situation, you have people looking at you over your
shoulder and thousands of people watching you on twitch at the same time.

Bonus Justin Wong vs Diago Clip:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XeM0rH_4ung&feature=kp](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XeM0rH_4ung&feature=kp)

~~~
VikingCoder
Explanation of that clip:

[http://www.penny-arcade.com/report/article/the-beast-is-
unle...](http://www.penny-arcade.com/report/article/the-beast-is-unleashed-
capcoms-seth-killian-explains-the-most-famous-minute#/entry/signin)

Another explanation of it:

[http://www.gatheryourparty.com/articles/2013/03/12/more-
than...](http://www.gatheryourparty.com/articles/2013/03/12/more-than-mashing-
evo-moment-37/)

------
Metapony
I think the great thing about this story is the crowd. That's a detail to
arcades that is forgotten to time. Whatever the game, if someone was good at
it, (and the arcade wasn't totally dead of course,) people would stop and
watch. You could save your quarters and watch graphics and levels you'd never
seen.

------
Flynn
What a great story. That took me back.

I remember getting good enough at Dragon's Lair and Space Ace to pull off this
rockstar demo, but then I met my match when Cliff Hanger came around the local
arcade. I merely bled dollars, without getting very close to being able to
beat it.

------
jpalioto
I could beat both Dragon's Lair and Space Ace in the arcade. Although in Space
Ace, I used to skip the rocket boots portion. Space Ace was the rhythm game of
it's time ... getting the actions down with the music was the way to go!

------
pistle
Ha. I had that experience in the golden years of arcades. I studied up and
practiced pac-man to the point where I ended up in some crazy long game at
about age 7? This was still when pac-man had some relevance, so it was in a
nice, visible spot in one of the largest arcades in our area. I had a crowd of
12-20 behind me. I ended up freaking out a bit once I realized how many people
were there and I had to pee sooooo bad. I ran to the bathroom to a few "Wow!
Great job kid!" type things. I pretty much stopped even trying to think after
the 7th key.

------
mbubb
What a great Dad:

"A local arcade not far from where we lived regularly put old games up for
sale. My dad noticed that they had listed a Space Ace cabinet for $300. To
this day I will never forget my shock — my dad bought it and brought it into
our tiny apartment. I had a full-size, real-deal Space Ace arcade cabinet in
my childhood bedroom."

Important to recognize how much kids love these things and, as a parent, to
give in to frivolity at least once in a while...

------
Graham24
never liked Dragon's Lair it seemed to be to be putting graphics and
presentation above game play. It was also far to easy to die horribly all the
time, better to watch some other guy give it a go rather than pay twice the
price of all the other machines (possibly 50p rather than 20p).

I prefered Joust.

------
zomgbbq
Dragon's Lair and Space Ace are both on iOS AppStore. Space Ace was a much
easier game to beat in the arcades but I never got far on Dragon's Lair. Now,
thanks to the mobile app, I can finish the game while my son watches on -
amazed at my dexterity. A so the torch is passed.

~~~
aeberbach
But was the iOS version ever fixed? I got it, played up to the point where the
giant suit of armor is sending electricity down the tiled floor at Dirk who
has to jump several times to avoid it ("Electric Knight Battle" according to
some walkthroughs). There was just no way to get through that scene on iPad.
Many people reported the same issue.

~~~
zomgbbq
It's a timing trick to get past it! This scene mirror reverses so you may need
to invert left/right but the solution is that once you've gone left-right and
then jumped forward you'll have to do something like left-right-left-<press
right again IMMEDIATELY after pressing left before the animation stops>. Then
a final forward, then sword. Then you go on.

------
axilmar
What was really impressive in the arcades was not Dragons Lair but Ms Pacman
and scoring over 600,000 points. I've seen some guys doing it and they kept
eating all of the ghosts on power pill touch over and over. That's one of the
most amazing video game feats ever.

------
ekianjo
On a side note, if you want to play Dragon's Lair on PC these days, you can
use Daphne, which is a Laser Disc Games Emulator: [http://www.daphne-
emu.com/site3/index_hi.php](http://www.daphne-emu.com/site3/index_hi.php)

~~~
NoPiece
Also available on Steam:

[http://store.steampowered.com/app/227380/](http://store.steampowered.com/app/227380/)

~~~
ekianjo
Daphne plays everything, not just Dragon's Lair, by the way.

------
egypturnash
I was part of a crowd gathering around this sort of thing once. The person
playing it pulled the same trick of maxing out their score by skipping the
very last move of the game until their last life, too. This was one of the
local arcades in New Orleans, though.

------
aNoob7000
Oh man, this really brings back memories. I can't tell you the number of
weekends that I spent at the local arcade playing Pac man, Donkey Kong,
Defender, Robotron 2048, Q*Bert, and countless other games.

------
mbrock
We had the (much uglier) NES version of this game when I was a kid. It was the
bane of our goddamned lives. I remember me and my brothers trying for several
frustrated hours to get past the very first screen.

------
sehugg
Ha! I did the exact same thing when I beat Dragon's Lair, had the crowd
gathered around, mic drop and everything. A computer gaming magazine had
listed most of the moves so I studied up the night before.

------
Natsu
For anyone who wants to see the game, watch this:

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y6uEx5gWovA](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y6uEx5gWovA)

------
snarfy
I recall the crowd phenomenon was revived again briefly with fighting games
before the arcades disappeared.

~~~
talmand
It was. That was during my teenage years when Street Fighter II and Mortal
Kombat drew in the crowds. Ah, the days of saving your spot in line by putting
your quarter up against the bottom of the monitor glass. Back when you had to
put something up to prove your worth more than the effort it takes to push the
START button.

