Page 25 - Old School Gamer Magazine Issue #21 Free Edition

1983, but a few years later, I went to the local arcade in town and saw it from a distance. The thing I remember most is the narrator telling the story of the game with the music and sounds in the background. I had never seen an arcade game that real before. At first, I was not a fan of the game because it was really hard. It made me spend all my tokens back in the day, and I hardly got far in the game. After getting older and better at games, Dragon's Lair became one of my favorite arcade games of all time. My favorite sequence in the game is the ramps with the large rolling balls. To me, it reminds me of bowling balls and growing up in the arcade section of bowling alleys. My least favorite sequence would have to be any scene using the sword. It's really hard to determine when to hit the sword button and when to wait until the light flickers.
BILL DONOHUE
I first encountered Dragon's Lair in the foyer of the Senator theatre in Downtown Chico. The movie house was located near the small park with the bandstand where years later we would play our last show in Chico before moving to the Bay Area, and about a block away from The Haunted Tower, which is the subject of another Jaded Gamer column to be written later. Richard "The Mad Scientist" Kisling (He got the nickname from inventing a drink called The Nebulon Paralyzer. I don't know what the hell he put in it, but it definitely worked as advertised!) and I had gone to the Midnight Movies to catch a pair of cult films. We wandered into the foyer, and there it was: a game like no other we'd ever seen. There were no pixelated images wandering around a bland background. No random "bleeps" and "bloops." No, this looked like a cartoon... a glorious, full-color cartoon. Right away, we knew we had to play it. Half an hour later, we'd blown all our beer money. Our favorite scene was the beginning of the gameplay. Our least favorite scene was the beginning of gameplay because
we never could get past that rat bastard. I think alcohol might have had something to do with that... Did we like the game? Are you nuts? Did we like the game... you'd have to be a moron to think that! Geez!!!
MICHAEL THOMASSON
My first encounter was in '83 at the Aladdin's Castle arcade in Fayette Mall in Lexington, Kentucky. Before even seeing Don Bluth's animation used in the game, I knew that it was something special, as there was a crowd gathered around the coin-op. That particular arcade often mounted a secondary monitor on top of popular titles to allow onlookers to see the action if an over-the-shoulder spot wasn't available. It also served to attract nearby walkers from the mall hallway. It was the first coin-op I ever encountered that took an extra quarter. At fifty cents, it was a big spend in the early '80s. I was fond of the "Ye Whirlpools" and "Ye Rapids" levels as the discoloration in the water made for easy navigating in a game that was often more trial and error than apparent. Of course, my favorite sequence was the battle with Singe, although I was never able to complete it myself until it was released on the Sega CD over a decade later in December of '93.
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