Best Retro Arcade Games | Dragons Lair Arcade Gameplay

Playing the best retro arcade games on a custom built arcade! Dragons Lair’s epic visuals and gameplay make it one of the best retro games of all time. Arcade games in the 80’s were not like Dragons Lair. Donkey Kong another legendary game looks and plays great, But it doesn’t look like Dragons Lair! Seeing Dragons Lair in the arcade for the first time was mind blowing! I was used to small Mario and Galaga sprites! Dragons Lair has lifelike visuals that tell a story of a Knight named Dirk who has to save Daphne (damsel in distress) from a HUGE Green Dragon! It was 1983…I had never seen anything like it!!

The good news for Dragons Lair fans is that Arcade1up will be releasing a 3/4 Dragons Lair cabinet coming soon!! Dragon’s Lair Arcade1up release date not yet set!! I can wait for it to come out!! If it looks and plays as good as my Arcade I will buy one for the mancave! I am a big fan of Arcade1up and love my Outrun and Pac Man cabinets! They look and play great!! Fingers crossed for Dragons Lair and Killer Instinct!!

Dragon Lair Deep Dive
Dragon’s Lair is a video game franchise created by Rick Dyer and Don Bluth. The series is famous for its Western animation-style graphics and convoluted decades-long history of being ported to many platforms and being remade into television and comic book series.

The first game in the series is titled Dragon’s Lair, originally released for arcades in 1983 by Cinematronics. It uses laserdisc technology, offering greatly superior graphics compared to other video games at the time. The game was ported to several other platforms, but as no home system technology of that era could accommodate the graphical quality of LaserDisc, several abridged versions of the original game were released under different names. The first true sequel, Dragon’s Lair II: Time Warp, had started development as early as 1984, but would only appear in arcades in 1991. While its graphics were once again praised, its now outdated and limited interactivity compared to the newer generation of arcade games kept it from reaching the popularity of the original.

The two main games in the series are considered gaming classics and are frequently re-released for each new generation of consoles. In 2010, they were bundled alongside the unrelated 1984 Bluth Group game Space Ace in the Dragon’s Lair Trilogy which was made available across numerous platforms.

Forays into other media include a short lived animated series that aired on ABC in 1984 and a comic-book miniseries released in 2003. Plans for a feature-length film have existed since the 1980s and have resurfaced in 2015, when Bluth launched a crowd-funding campaign to secure funds for a Dragon’s Lair movie pitch. A Kickstarter campaign was unsuccessful, and a second campaign on Indiegogo reached its target in early 2016