Dragon's Lair

Dragon's Lair is a legend from the arcades that returned on the Philips CD-i in a form that finally made sense at home. The knight Dirk the Daring ventures into the castle of the dragon Singe to rescue Princess Daphne, and the whole game is essentially an animated film into which the player intervenes with short commands at the right moment. When doors open with tentacles reaching out, or the floor gives way underfoot, the player must instantly choose a direction or draw a sword. A mistake means instant death and one of dozens of carefully animated scenes in which the knight comes to a bad end. Progress therefore rests on memorizing the correct sequence of reactions, a principle as austere as it is addictive.

Technically, it was ideal material for the CD medium. The original arcade machine used LaserDisc and played back full animation drawn by professionals from the classic school of animated film, and the CD-i version builds directly on that: the picture is fluid, the music and sound effects come from the original, and the result feels like a Saturday-morning cartoon the player gets to reach into. Controlling it via the CD-i controller demands a certain tolerance for lag, since the window for the correct decision is short and imprecision is punished.

At the time, Dragon's Lair was seen both as a showcase of what the new medium could do and as proof that interactive film has its limits. The game offers a stunning spectacle but fairly shallow gameplay, something critics already pointed out back in the eighties. Today it's worth trying mainly for the animation, which hasn't aged a day, and for the peculiar kind of tension that arises when the player knows the scene by heart and their hand still trembles. It is a piece of history that still feels like a carnival attraction in the best sense of the term. At the same time, it's a title that influenced an entire generation of developers: the idea of a game as a film into which one intervenes only at precisely defined moments has returned in countless forms ever since, and it is still called the legacy of Dragon's Lair.