The Nostalgia Critic does Dragon's Lair
I have some childhood memories of this game, which I suspect are probably very similar to those of anyone of the same age. So I'll write my memories up, and see if anyone can identify.
I was 5 years old when Dragon's Lair first came out.
Children don't have much control over their own mobility (especially in the American suburbs, where it is impossible to get anywhere without going on a car ride). So I didn't get to the video game arcades as often as I would have liked. But there was the occasional party at ShowBiz Pizza (back when there still was a Showbiz Pizza(W)). And there also were occasional trips to Putt Putt Golf, which had an arcade (back when there still was a Putt Putt Golf). Plus, for a while during the 1980s, many family restaurants used to have video games in the waiting lobby.
So, I would see this game around, and I do have childhood memories of it.
It's funny the way the mind of a child works. A child doesn't have any sort of sense about what things are normal, and what things are abnormal. A child just assumes that whatever they experience is the way the world has always been.
So I had no idea how revolutionary the graphics were on Dragon's Liar. Nor did I fully appreciate that this wasn't so much a video game as a series of short little movies with a joystick.
It was only until years later, after Dragon's Liar had disappeared from the arcade, that the memory of this game began to confuse me.
In the early 90s, when video game graphics were still quite primitive, I began to have vague recollections of this memory from the mists of early childhood. (Time passes slower when you're a child, so the 10 years or so between 1983 and 1993 seemed like an eternity of time had come and gone.) But the memory just confused me. Was I really remembering a video game that had graphics as good as a cartoon? How was such a thing possible? Did I just dream the whole thing up, or were these memories real?
It wasn't until the Internet and Wikipedia fully came into it's own (about another 10 years later) that I finally got closure on the Dragon's Liar issue.
Saturday, November 28, 2015
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2 comments:
Well, I've got a decade-plus on you, so I recall this "game" all too well. I might have sunk a dollar or two into the original table console, but, wonder of wonders, no more than that. Even Ms.Pac-Man fetched a greater fortune from my pockets. Why? Because Dragon's Lair had THE all-time shittiest gameplay going. I recall watching a guy make it past the molten lava, and that was satisfaction enough for me.
Yeah, that's a vague memory I have as well.
I didn't have a lot of income to blow on this game at 5 years old, but sometimes at Showbiz Pizza birthday parties, all the kids would be given a certain amount of tokens by the adults. And a lot of my tokens would go into this game--often to my frustration.
But again at 5, my perspective was skewed. I always thought the fault was with me, and not with the game. But I could never get further than 30 seconds in without dying.
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