One of the only films, period, to live up to the book.
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And i’d argue whether it can be called a videogame. It’s just an extremely limited interactive animated film with quick time events that just takes you to different chapters on the laser disc, no?
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#releasethebluthcut should trend soon
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It was the first cabinet game since the first generation of blockbusters like pac-man and king kong that had looky-loos of all demographics crowding around. It was the first game also to go up to $.50 which made a lot of viewers instead of players. This was the first game I remember having a monitor on top of the cabinet so people in the back of the crowd could also see the game-play as it was happening. In my mind that’s the genesis of Twitch today - people love just watching other people play video games.
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They released a version of it on DVD a while back which I think just used DVD menu functionality to play the game.
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I suppose it’s an interesting philosophical discussion about what maketh a videogame but then you’re getting into the thorny issue of gate-keeping and i don’t wanna travel that road. Even though i did in my previous comment!
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I want to go back to Disneyworld as an adult because I have this suspicion that if I wade through enough Cinderellas and Snow Whites and Mickeys and Tiggers and Chips-n-Dales, there will be a Princess Eilonwy. She’ll be leaning against a refreshment stand, smoking a clove cigarette, and when I go up to her she’ll say, “Grow the fuck up! Just because it wasn’t The Little Mermaid doesn’t mean it was good! It’s because of stalker fanbois like you that I get stuck with this bullshit gig. They bumped me from Belle for this!”
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Great graphics, terrible gameplay. I saved a ton of quarters watching a guy play the game all the way through at an arcade. Winning was just remembering to flick the joy stick in the right direction at the right time.
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I was shocked to learn recently it was all written in the 1960s, at a steady rate of one book per year.
It feels so modern. Obviously it set many templates for fantasy novels to follow thereafter.
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I just watched the playthrough for the first time. I’m relieved I never wasted time trying to beat the game now. It’s as you say:
Great graphics, terrible gameplay
So much of it is just abrupt, repetitive action sequences and no real story beyond “save the princess.” It looks more like an experiment than a real game.
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Half the problem was people abusing the cabinet as they played, making game play less responsive for anyone who came after.
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It’s basically a very long sequence of quick time events. The entire game is a long string of “press X to not die”, with very short timers.
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Sure, basically. But how does that not make it a video game?
It’s an electronic game that where you control images on a video screen. That’s basically the dictionary definition right there.
Just because the implementation may be simplistic doesn’t make it any less of a video game.
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Yes, me too! And not just now, reading this… since they came out! Thanks for the disambiguation 
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The big problem of this movie for me was it did not look like a classic Disney animated movie. I guess that was the idea they were going for but damn it was disappointing to see.
Well I s’pose, even though you’re not controlling anything just choosing chapters at specific moments. I was going to make the argument about it having no ‘graphics’ as such since it’s just a laser disc video but then you have things like Her Story which I would still class as a videogame. And here is that road I feared to go down… sounding like those people who sneer at so called ‘walking simulators’ as not being games when they assuredly are.
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Neither did the people who tried to play them.
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And yet, the fact that the “quick time event” is now such a standard game mechanic that we have a jargon for it points to how foundational Dragon’s Lair was. Even if it wasn’t your cup of tea (nor mine).
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this reminds me of the time they got a laser disc player at the y daycare program and some teen in charge thought it would be a good idea to show the kids fire and ice which haunted me for years. i was probably like 6? i think we saw troll, also. there was a weird time (perhaps not over) when some of the dark fantasy and animation on the market was really ambiguously packaged making it easy for a preoccupied single mother to thoughtlessly grab some harmless-looking vhs to pacify her barely-supervised children, resulting in some pretty early-onset mindfucks.
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He also added a weird unnecessary mystic subplot to the “genetically modified rats with technology” in The Secret of NIMH (based on Robert C. O’Brien’s Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH).
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