Dragon's Lair review: a cartoon you had to survive

The screen does not look like a video game. It looks like a Saturday morning cartoon, only better: a knight in armor, a crumbling castle, a dragon asleep on a pile of gold. Dirk the Daring has come to rescue Princess Daphne from the dragon Singe, and you are the only thing standing between him and a very funny death.

You control his reflexes, not his feet

Dragon's Lair is almost entirely animated scenes. You do not walk Dirk around. Instead, at key moments, you push a direction or press the button, and if you picked right and picked in time, the film plays on. Pick wrong and you watch the other version: Dirk turned into a skeleton, dropped into a pit, swallowed by goo. The game controls his reflexes, not his actions, and every scene is a quick time event before anyone had that name for it.

That is both its magic and its limit. Storing the art on a LaserDisc let it look far beyond the sprites every other cabinet was using, but it also locked the gameplay into those choices. There is no improvising. There is the right move, and there is the death scene.

Memorize, then perform

Dragon's Lair is a memory test in armor. You learn each room by dying in it, and then you learn it again when the game shows you a mirrored version, where the correct move is on the other side. The order of the rooms looks random, but it is not random; it shifts depending on how you are doing. Getting further is less about quick hands and more about paying attention the last time you failed.

The death scenes are the reason people kept watching. Dirk is clumsy, easily scared and reluctant, and his failures are animated with real comic timing. Losing felt like being in on the joke.

Dragon's Lair was the only machine where failing was half the show.

What it meant back then

In the summer it came out, Dragon's Lair was a genuine event in American arcades. It was the first video arcade game to cost 50 cents, and operators still reported long lines. Dan Rather covered it on CBS Evening News. It also topped the Play Meter charts for locations like ShowBiz Pizza Place, where kids waited between birthday cake and animatronic bands for their turn to lose two quarters in no time at all.

Most people never beat it. Everybody remembers watching someone try.

Playing it now

As a game, Dragon's Lair is simple and unforgiving. As a piece of art, it is still astonishing. The animation by Don Bluth, a former Disney animator, holds up completely, and so does the idea Rick Dyer started from: the feeling of the text game Adventure, turned into pictures. Go in expecting a memorization challenge rather than an action game, enjoy the deaths, and take notes. You will need them.