Why I didn't like Dragon's Lair

It had everything that I like, a good fantasy story, animation by Don Bluth (one of my favorite animators), it was a video game... How could I not like it?

Well here's the thing. The first time I saw a Dragon's Lair, I was around 10-11 years old (can't remember exactly) at a campground we used to visit in northwestern Illinois. My brother and I ventured down to the gameroom with our couple of bucks in quarters, and joined a few other kids from the campground marvelling at this new, beautiful game. The price being 50 cents per play didn't even cause us to pause, my brother being older than me (and if I remember right everyone else there) walked up to the game and dropped in his $0.50. After about 30 seconds of "What the hell" and "How do you control this thing" and 3 death scenes, he walked away with the conclusion that the game was broken. One of the other kids made some comment at my brother about sucking at games, and let him try it, he'd get it to work, only to have the same exact end result. I didn't even bother wasting my change, neither did anyone else... We all thought the game was broken.

Here's my huimble opinion, take it for what it's worth. In the beginning Nolan said games need to be easy to learn and difficult to master. The instructions on Pong, "Avoid Missing Ball for High Score" were a good representation of this. Dragon's Lair wasn't by any stretch a complicated game, but there was absolutely no preparation, no instruction, no reference at all on the game (that I can recall), that the way to play is to perfectly time your moves, to move the joystick in the right direction or to depress the sword button at the exact right moment. I mean playing it a few times, one could most likely easily figure it out, but at 50 cents a pop, who would want to try (especially a kid that only had a few quarters)? I mean, every other game up until that point, you used a joystick and/or buttons to control the motion of the character on the screen. You move the stick to the right, and the little pixilated thingamabob moves to the right, immediately. You push the fire button, and whatever action is supposed to happen just happens, whether it be a missle shooting out, a swipe of a sword, or a punch/kick from said thingamabob... With this game, if you move to the right, when you are supposed to move to the left, you die. If you don't move in the exact moment you are supposed to move, you die. If you try moving any other time, the guy doesn't move. If in the offhand chance you happen to move in the right direction at the right time, the story continues. The control scheme was so vastly different from anything else that was out there at the time, but of course the game makes no mention of this. So ultimately what happens is that unless someone who knew what they were doing just happened to explain it to you, or you happened to read in some videogame magazine how to play it,(or you had a crapload of quarters to blow, and an infinite amount of patience) you would have no idea what to do, and have the same conclusion as the group of kids that were trying to play it that one day in the campground arcade... This sucks, lets go play Galaga.

Later on in life, I decided to memorize all of the moves and play through the whole game as I really wanted to see how the whole thing plays out, but even knowing all of the moves, I still couldn't get the timing just right, and never made it through. Perhaps that is the "gameplay" aspect that so many fans of the game go on about. To me, it's just like finding the most beautiful girl in the room is actually interested in talking to you, but only speaks French. And then once you find someone who can translate for you, you find out she has the brain capacity of the average goldfish.