If you were around in 1983, you probably remember just how jaw-dropping Dragon’s Lair was. At a time when arcades were dominated by pixels, this looked like a Saturday morning cartoon had somehow escaped onto an arcade screen.
The hand-drawn animation, humor, and laser-disc technology made Dragon’s Lair unlike anything else in the arcade. It was also one of the first games to charge 50 cents per play, which could add up quickly when you had no idea what you were doing.
And believe me, I remember putting plenty of quarters into this thing as a kid without getting very far.
But just how expensive was it to actually beat Dragon’s Lair in 1983?
The answer according to youtuber Mass Replay? $33.
That might not sound like much today, but $33 in 1983 is equivalent to roughly $107 today. And that’s after more than five hours of gameplay across four sessions.
The video also takes a look at what made Dragon’s Lair so revolutionary… and so frustrating. Rather than controlling Dirk directly, you’re essentially learning a sequence of precisely timed inputs. Make the wrong move, press the button too early, or fall for one of the game’s traps, and you’re dead.
In other words, it was basically an early quick-time-event game where the tutorial was: die repeatedly until you figure it out.
Check out the full playthrough below and relive one of the most visually spectacular… and financially dangerous… arcade games of the 1980s.
[Via BB]