Dragon’s Lair – “Dirk, who knew no fear”

When Zzap! 64 interviewed Chris Butler about making Ghosts’n Goblins, the interviewer reacted strongly to the game Butler said he’d be working on next. “Space Harrier! You’re joking?! […] Elite are going to have a special hardware add on to mimic the hydraulic movement of the original?!”. “Yeah,” he replied, “have a robot arm to plug into the joystick port… next question”. There were already fixed standup versions of Sega’s 3D shooter at the arcades though (also, the ones with moving seats weren’t actually hydraulic). Around the time Butler was speaking, however, another company was about to release home versions of a game whose arcade hardware was even more intrinsic to its appeal. And for that company, Software Projects, it would become their biggest success in years.

The laserdisc format (which looks a bit like an LP-sized CD) didn’t really catch on in the West, although it was more widely adopted in some places in Asia, particularly Hong Kong. There, it was popular into the 1990s and as well as a format for movies was also often used for karaoke. One medium in which laserdisc did have a Western impact was arcade games. As with motion-based set-ups, Sega had been early to the laserdisc game idea, releasing Astron Belt in Spring 1983. That used the disc’s capabilities to mix a space shooter with background video taken from various films, including Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. The big breakthrough in the West came not long afterwards with Dragon’s Lair, published by Cinematronics.

Made with former Disney animator Don Bluth, developer Advanced Microcomputer Systems set out to make an interactive cartoon. They succeeded, if more on the ‘cartoon’ than the ‘interactive’. By cutting back the player’s inputs to brief single moments (in the style that would become known as Quick Time Events) the game could be built up from detailed video clips. Its story of a knight rescuing a maiden from a dragon (yep, another one of those) could play out in animation a world away from the standard arcade game of the time. In the context of a big wow moment in an arcade, even limited interactivity with a clichéd cartoon was enough. It became a hit in the US, even with a higher-than-standard price of 50 cents per play. It made it to the UK as well. 

No one, you would think, could have looked at a game built almost exclusively on the specific lush visual style made possible by the laserdisc and an expensive animation studio, and think that trying to reproduce it on the Commodore 64 or ZX Spectrum was a good idea. The funny thing is that it seems that no one ever did think that was a good idea, and yet it came about anyway, happening in several stages. First came Coleco, the makers of Cabbage Patch Kids. Their ColecoVision console had also been a success in the US, and they followed it up in 1983 with a microcomputer, the Coleco Adam. Coleco had plans to make a laserdisc add-on for their computer, and so it was an obvious move to acquire the rights to make a conversion of the defining laserdisc arcade game. 

Then the Adam sold badly, and Coleco scrapped the laserdisc add-on. They had already spent big on Dragon’s Lair, though. Some places say $2 million, which seems absurd, although there is a fair amount of other evidence that they were not a well-run company in the 1980s. With the rights acquired, it made sense to make a version of the game anyway that might at least recoup something. Coleco released their 8-bit, sprite-based Dragon’s Lair in 1984. It did not look anything like the arcade game, but loosely adapted some of its scenes, in some cases extending them and adding a little more interactivity (adding things trying to blow you off the game’s falling platforms, for instance). The game had no great impact. Coleco discontinued the Adam in 1985, and went bankrupt in 1988.

Next in the story comes Alan Maton, the boss of Software Projects. They had seen massive UK success with Jet Set Willy and their reissue of Manic Miner, and when Crash journalists met Maton in Summer 1986 he drove them around in his Porsche. Since Jet Set Willy, though, Software Projects’s biggest successes had been… Jet Set Willy II (which wasn’t even a real sequel) and Perils of Willy on the VIC-20. The only sniff of chart success they’d had that wasn’t Willy-shaped was with arcade conversion Hunchback at the Olympics, an unlikely crossover that reached #18 in the Commodore 64 chart in May 1985. Maton told Crash that their recent games “didn’t do very well and weren’t very good” and that they were now prioritising quality.

On holiday in France, Maton saw a copy of the Adam Dragon’s Lair in a shop. He was intrigued enough to buy it and to seek out an Adam to play it on once he had returned home. He liked what he saw, and thought that there was an opportunity there, so he enquired about getting the rights. Coleco told him that while they had the home computer rights, they weren’t allowed to sub-license, and he needed to talk to Magicom, the company set up specifically for Dragon’s Lair. Magicom turned out to have gone bankrupt and its solicitors directed him back to Coleco. As Maton explained it to Crash, “it was like ‘Er – can I go out Dad?’ ‘Ask yer Mum.’ ‘Er – can I go out Mum?’ ‘Ask yer Dad.’”

Once he’d eventually resolved that one, he put teams to work on assorted home computer versions of Dragon’s Lair. Nicole Baikaloff worked on graphics across various versions, with Soo Maton also contributing some on the Spectrum. John Darnell, Steve Birtles and Colin Porch handled the Commodore 64 version of the game, which made it out first. Based on some comments in a preview of that version, the development time was a relatively long six months. Paul Hodgson, Andy Walker and Mike Davies did the Spectrum version, stepping in to replace a previous programmer who couldn’t get it to work. They junked it and started from scratch, apart from Baikaloff’s graphics. 

As Paul Hodgson later told Retro Gamer, “Luckily I knew pretty much nothing about the original laserdisc game otherwise I’d have run a mile!”. Still, he wanted to know more about what he’d signed up to, so he took a trip to Blackpool where, somewhere on the Golden Mile, there was still a Dragon’s Lair arcade machine in operation. “I quickly found out that Dragon’s Lair was no ordinary game. Quite how someone decided that it would convert nicely to the Spectrum escapes me.” Again, though, no one had decided that as such. He was working on a conversion of Coleco’s conversion of the original, and that was more manageable.

Hodgson nonetheless thought of making the game as having been a bit of a nightmare, but was pleased with some aspects. “It did have some neat technical features — we multi-loaded the various levels with a bunch of central library routines staying resident”. The Commodore 64 version did some even cleverer things with its loading, having the next level load from cassette while the current one was being played, something many reviews commented on positively.

When it came to the rest of the game, it found at least one fan in the press. Francis Jago wrote of the C64 version in Your Computer that “Software Projects has managed to create an amazingly good replica of the arcade game […] it combines spectacular use of the Commodore graphics with fun and imaginative music. In many ways Dragon’s Lair is the best arcade conversion yet”. Jago was pretty much on his own there, though, with most review verdicts on the game ranging from mediocre to poor.

“It would take a brave programmer to try and attempt a conversion of this particular coin-op” wrote Computer & Video Games, a commonly-held sentiment. They went on to mention the “incredibly irritating death sequence”. Having to repeatedly watch the same animation of a skeleton reforming into your hero Dirk is indeed excruciating, especially given the extreme high difficulty which is the only thing giving the game any length at all. As Richard Eddy wrote in Zzap! 64, “the action — although not particularly fast — gets extremely frustrating to the point where you almost give up”.

The graphics are one of the things the game has going for it. They’re nothing like the arcade game whatsoever, obviously, but they do retain an unusual kind of bold style which stands out on the C64 or Spectrum. Not everyone was sure about that either, though. In a separate Computer & Video Games review of the C64 version, they noted that Software Projects “didn’t use the graphics capabilities to the full in bringing Dragon’s Lair to the small screen”. Ferdy Hamilton in Commodore User likewise wrote that while the game wasn’t disastrous, “I just hate to see a good opportunity go to waste”.

Ultimately, some of the lukewarm reaction came from critics unimpressed by the original game and its limited interactivity, never mind its loose 8-bit approximation. Gary Penn in Zzap! 64 wrote that “Software Projects have made the best of a bad job”. Over at sister magazine Crash, they summarised it nicely with a comparison to the arcade original, saying the Spectrum version “suffers from most of its weaknesses — sadly it retains few of the original’s strengths”

Software Projects put out Dragon’s Lair in a box with a bold front cover based on the original game’s graphics, and it proved a big enough commercial success to reach the top of the UK combined formats chart for a week in August 1986. The company then released a sequel of their own devising that made it to #19 in the UK combined formats chart in May 1987 (it later got a DOS port which was one of the first games made by Bethesda Softworks). After that, Software Projects never released anything that troubled the charts again. Still, the success of this one bizarrely conceived oddity meant that they weren’t quite just ‘the Jet Set Willy company’ forever more.

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Sources:

• Conversion Capers – Dragon’s Lair, Martyn Carroll, Retro Gamer No. 38, May 2007
• Lure of the Dragon, Tony Flanagan & Julian Rignall, Crash No. 31, August 1986, accessed via Spectrum Computing
• The Butler did it!, Gary Penn, Zzap! 64 No. 17, September 1986, accessed via the Internet Archive and also available via Def Guide to Zzap! 64
• Laserdisc legend, Jim Bickmann, Dragon’s Lair Project, 1998
• Lasers, Discs and Dragons: Remembering Don Bluth’s Dragon’s Lair, George Bachaelor, Paleotronic, 2020
• Dragon’s Lair and the Laser Game Craze – Daring Discs, The Dot Eaters, 2019
• Preserving B-Cinema: Disc-Junkie Illuminates the Alleys and Backlots of Hong Kong and L.A., John Murphy, Cultbytes, 2025
• Dragon’s Lair (Coleco), Collin Pierce, Hardcore Gaming 101, 2021
• Software Projects, chart history at Computer Hits
• C+VG preview – Dragon’s Lair, Computer & Video Games No. 58, August 1986, accessed via Spectrum Computing
• Software Shortlist – Dragon’s Lair, Francis Jago, Your Computer Vol. 6 No. 9, September 1986, accessed via the Internet Archive
• C+VG reviews – Dragon’s Lair, Computer & Video Games No. 62, December 1986, accessed via Spectrum Computing
• Zzap! Test – Dragon’s Lair, Zzap! 64 No. 17, September 1986, accessed via Def Guide to… Zzap! 64
• C+VG reviews – Dragon’s Lair, Computer & Video Games No. 59, September 1986, accessed via the Internet Archive
• Screen Scene – Dragon’s Lair, Ferdy Hamilton, Commodore User No. 36, September 1986, accessed via the Internet Archive
• Reviews – Dragon’s Lair, Crash No. 34, November 1986, accessed via the Internet Archive

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