Entering the Lair- Tale Two- Origins.

Hey Arcaders!

Now that we got my story out of the way- let’s talk about the game’s origins.

Now- everyone knows that Don Bluth and this team did the stunning animation, but three companies were involved in Dragon’s Lair. But the man who came up with the origins of Dragon’s Lair is Rick Dyer.

Rick had been working on a fantasy game he called “Secrets of the Lost Woods” and wanted to make it a toy for home use. After methods of animation including slideshows and a tape deck, cash till roll and giant rolodex failed to give him the look he wanted, he began to look elsewhere. He discovered the laserdisc- a brand new optical storage medium that had the ability to replicate movie quality animation. Disc access was random and chapter-based so it allowed almost instant access to any area of the disc. Then, one visit to the theater with his wife- seeing the movie The Secret Of N.I.M.H., He had a revelation…

Enter… Don Bluth.

Don had been trained at Disney, and spent some time at Filmation too. But when he was working on Disney’s The Fox and the Hound (1981), creative differences between Bluth and studio executives had arisen concerning artistic control and animation training practices. On his 42nd birthday in 1979, Bluth resigned from the studio to establish his own animation studio, Don Bluth Productions, along with Gary Goldman, John Pomeroy, and nine fellow Disney animators. When Rick approached Don- he definitely saw the potential- but as an actual game, he was very unsure. Games up to this point had always been about instant action, and reaction. The ship fires, you move and fire back. But in Dragon’s Lair- the scene plays, you have to react to keep going- or die trying. But Don was hooked. They started animation in 1981- during a animators strike in Hollywood. So they had a very limited staff to get the job done. They scraped most of the original story, and focused on one location- an evil and enchanted castle, where a princess is held captive by an unknown wizard, and his dragon. Add a brave knight and lots of hazards- a game began to take shape.

With Rick and his staff handling the board set and programming, and Don and his staff finishing the animation in 1982. Now they need a distributor to build a cabinet and get it into the arcades.

Enter… Cinematronics.

Cinematronics had been a staple of the arcades of the late 1970s and early 1980s- they were the kings of vector based games, and stunning cabinets and artwork. Their games were all about fantasy and science fiction- and were in a class by themselves.

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Let’s take a look at some early Cinematronics goodness!

By the early 1980s, Cinematronics filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection- Vector games were not selling like they had been. They had tried releasing a few raster games- Zzyzzyxx, Jack the Giantkiller, Freeze, and Naughty Boy.

But- when asked to distribute Dragon’s Lair, they were all in. And they had the perfect cabinet-