Dragon’s Lair looks more like a cartoon than a videogame. There are two reasons for that: it was animated by legend Don Bluth, the man behind The Land Before Time (1988); and it used LaserDisc technology, allowing for dramatically better graphics and sound than other games released in 1983.
It was advertised as the first truly 3D videogame, but it maybe should’ve been advertised as the hardest videogame. Notorious for its difficulty, the gameplay features timed button/stick movements to advance the story and was deliberately designed to eat up as many coins as possible, even though it was already twice as expensive as typical games.
Despite the game being a little frustrating to casual players, Dragon’s Lair’s beautiful animation and unique gameplay means it has endured in pop-culture consciousness: it’s featured in many films and TV shows, including Family Guy (1999) and Stranger Things (2016).
Curator Notes
I remember seeing Dragon’s Lair machines at the fish-and-chip shop when I was a kid. I was never really allowed to play that one because it was the $2 machine, and most were 20- or 50-cent machines, so it’s nostalgic as well, even though it's really important in the history of videogames.
Apart from the mechanics, no other videogame had graphics that looked like that. Don Bluth’s animation is just so iconic and ties into the films that kids loved in that era that he animated like An American Tale and A Land Before Time, which made it attractive to kids. It had the kind of animation they’d see in movies and that hadn’t happened before. In today’s media, it’s often in the background of arcade scenes to represent that arcade era, most recently in Stranger Things.
– Assistant Curator and Programmer Arieh Offman
From it's inception as a "playable" cartoon on Laserdisc through it's numerous sequels and releases on consoles and the little seen Saturday morning cartoon, YouTube channel Toy Galaxy outlines the history of Dragon's Lair.
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Collection
In ACMI's collection
On display until
16 February 2031
ACMI: Gallery 1
Credits
Collection metadata
ACMI Identifier
P181275
Curatorial section
The Story of the Moving Image → Games Lab → GL-02. Cluster 2 → GL-02-C03
Object Types
3D Object
Computer game equipment/Game
Exhibition Prop