![]() Dyer decided that an exciting action-based script, brought to life through high-quality animation, was what his project needed. Trying to figure out a way to make his concept marketable, inspiration struck when watching a recent animated film called The Secret of NIMH. Due to the failure to sell it to a manufacturer, only one game was designed for it, The Secrets of the Lost Woods.ĭyer concluded that the main issue with the Fantasy Machine was that it wasn’t thrilling enough for kids who had come to expect constant action and excitement in their entertainment. A later revision used a laserdisc with still images and voiced narration. Early versions had a scrolling paper reel with prose narrative and illustrations that would scroll to the proper scene based on decisions made by the player by pressing buttons corresponding to different actions. Inspired by early text adventures, the Fantasy Machine was similar to a “Choose Your Own Adventure” book. The game was the brainchild of Rick Dyer, who had based the concept on a failed attempt at marketing what he called the Fantasy Machine. Dragon’s Lair was a phenomenon.įrom Left to Right: Don Bluth, Rick Dyer, and Gary Goldman There were numerous ports, tons of merchandise, and even a short-lived Saturday-morning cartoon. Another tells the reporter that he spent at least forty dollars before beating it for the first time. One gamer calls it the best game he’s ever played. There is a news clip about the game which has a section dedicated to asking a few players about what they think of the game. ![]() Even though the game cost fifty cents, double what most arcade games cost at the time, everyone wanted to experience this unique game. Many arcades hooked up a second monitor above the cabinet so people could watch the game being played while waiting in line. Upon release, it’s hard to overestimate how jaw-dropping it must’ve been for gamers used to staring at small, pixelated sprite characters to see a game where all the action is presented through a well-animated cartoon. According to contemporary news coverage, many analysts were estimating that somewhere between twenty-five to fifty percent of all arcades would close by the end of the year. Home consoles were on their knees, and arcades weren’t doing much better. Dragon’s Lair and its follow-ups, having been kept in the public eye thanks to numerous ports, sequels, and conversions, are some of the few games of this type to be remembered to this day outside of hardcore fans.ĭragon’s Lair was released in the middle of the great video game crash of 1983. ![]() However, many were not, and there is usually a direct connection between the games that were re-released on later formats to the ones that are still remembered today. In fact, it was due to this brief revival of the genre that several classic laserdisc arcade games were re-released. While not the first game in this format (the first was Quarter Horse, a horserace betting simulator released in 1982, and Sega’s Astron Belt was released in Japan earlier in ‘83), Dragon’s Lair is considered a classic and the first major success of the genre, and inspired a glut of little remembered imitators, very similar to the FMV games of the early CD-ROM era. The laserdisc player housing the disc was placed inside an arcade cabinet, and with ROM chips controlling what parts of the video were played when, you had the first FMV games. Instead, all of the video was placed on a laserdisc, which was, for all intents and purposes, the forerunner of the DVD. In an intriguing example of history repeating itself, the first FMV game to take the world by storm was actually released in 1983, before most people even considered putting anything but music on a CD. The truth is that FMV games actually got their start almost a decade earlier. Once the novelty wore off though, people saw how boring and repetitive most of them were. After the start of the infamous hearings on video game violence in the mid-1990s, Night Trap, one of the flagship FMV games for the Sega CD, became a huge best-seller, and many other games were released in the wake of it. Often considered a blight upon the early era of CD-ROM games, and sometimes even blamed for the death of early consoles using the technology (Sega CD, anyone?), the truth is that while they are in most cases pretty forgettable, there is a reason that so many were made: people were excited by them at first. Full Motion Video Games loved by few, scorned by most.
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