Fighting Fantasy

Cover for Fighting Fantasy gamebooks, by Terry Oakes.

DOOM

Artwork by Don Ivan Punchatz

Cartographer: Claudia Rodriguez

Cartographer: Claudia Rodriguez
(Wizards of the West Coast)
Donato Giancola
22 x 17 in, oil on panel
2002

Dragon’s Lair: Animated Pencil Tests

The very fun and very difficult arcade game Dragon’s Lair was recently featured in the second season of Stranger Things. I saw a comment this morning online where a person who wasn’t familiar with Dragon’s Lair was complaining that the show featured an arcade game who’s technology was obviously far too advanced for the year 1983…

On the outside Dragon’s Lair does look far better and the style of animation and video was incredibly superior to games like Spy Hunter and Super Mario Bros, which were also published in 1983, but the technology on the inside was completely different.

Games like Spy Hunter and Mario Bros. were operated with an internal arcade system board and chip set that was specifically designed to run that game, and usually no other, and would often require multiple CPUs in order to process it’s graphics. At the time game developers were limited with what they could show off in a standard arcade cabinet, but Cinematronics Inc. found a way around it by teaming up with Don Bluth and creating Dragon’s Lair. What made Dragon’s Lair stand out from other arcade games is that instead of using an internal processor and CPU it was operated using a Laserdisc, which allowed Cinematronics to develop a game that rivaled the look and clarity of current animated films, while being able to stick it inside an arcade cabinet.

Basically, Dragon’s Lair used Laserdisc technology to playback what was essentially an animated film that required the player to press the joystick in a certain direction when the scene called for it. If they player hit the right direction at the correct time, the scene advanced. If not, you usually got something like this and then popped in another 50¢ to continue or started over from the beginning:

Dragon’s Lair helped spawn the creation of numerous Laserdisc arcade games throughout the 1980s, such as Space Ace (also a Cinematronic/Don Bluth production), Cliffhanger, and Badlands to name a few. The technology that drove games like Dragon’s Lair was not unlike the tech that allowed you to play games on your DVDs as an extra feature (see: Harry Potter Interactive DVD Game).

Before I lose the point of this post allow me to show you some cool stuff from the Don Bluth Collection. Using multiple images of production drawings from the game I put together these animated pencil tests from Dragon’s Lair:

These production drawings, which were drawn by lead and inbetween animators, were created as an outline for the final look of the scene. They were either xeroxed or retraced onto a piece of acetate and colored, creating a single cel of animation (12 of these together and in sequence and you get roughly one second of film):