The Simpsons had only been on-air for one season when Konami released this side-scrolling brawler in 1991. It wasn’t that Konami knew how popular The Simpsons would become, they just already had the blueprints for the game. Two years earlier they’d developed the Teenage Mutant Nina Turtles arcade game and applied almost identical mechanics, play style and combat to The Simpsons. What set The Simpsons apart was the accurate voice renditions of Springfield’s favourite cartoon family, with the show’s main cast voicing the game’s characters.
Dragon’s Lair looks more like a cartoon than a videogame. That’s because it was animated by Don Bluth, the legend behind The Land Before Time (1988), and its LaserDisc technology allowed for dramatically better graphics and sound than other games of the era. It was advertised as the first truly 3D videogame, but maybe should’ve been advertised as the hardest. The timed button/stick gameplay was deliberately designed to eat up as many coins as possible, even though it was already twice as expensive as typical games.
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"Mmm.... that looks entertaining."
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On display until
16 February 2031
ACMI: Gallery 1
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The Story of the Moving Image → Games Lab → GL-02. Cluster 2 → GL-02-C03