Dragon's Lair · Arcade (LaserDisc) · 1983 · Pure Memorisation
Don Bluth's animation made it the most beautiful game in any arcade. A perfect run lasts under twelve minutes. Almost nobody saw one, because every correct move had to be learned by dying to the wrong one.
Dragon's Lair reached arcades on 1 July 1983, distributed by Cinematronics and developed by Advanced Microcomputer Systems, the company of its creator Rick Dyer. Its selling point was obvious from across the room: instead of sprites it played full animation from a LaserDisc, drawn by the former Disney animator Don Bluth and his studio, which looked far better than anything else in the arcade. The cost of that beauty was control. The player does not steer Dirk the Daring through the castle; the player watches pre-recorded scenes and must push the joystick or the sword button at precisely the right moment to branch to the next one. Any other input — or the correct input a fraction late — plays a death animation. Because the prompts are subtle and the timing windows tight, the game can only really be learned by trial and error, which in an arcade meant paying for each error. A perfect run with no deaths lasts no more than twelve minutes, and the distance between those twelve minutes and the amount of money most players spent failing to see them is what made Dragon's Lair famous. It became one of the most recognisable games of its era and is held by the Smithsonian Institution alongside Pong and Pac-Man.
A conventional arcade game is hard because it asks for skill: reflexes, positioning, reading enemy patterns. Dragon's Lair asks for knowledge. Each scene has a correct answer and the game rarely tells you what it is. You learn that the floor will collapse by watching it collapse under you, then pay again to try the other direction.
That makes it one of the purest memorisation games ever sold, and it explains both its appeal and its reputation. Crowds gathered to watch the animation; players who had memorised a route became attractions in their own right. For everyone else, the machine was a very expensive way to see Dirk die in several dozen beautifully drawn ways.