> Most games in the Dragon's Lair series are interactive films where the player controls Dirk the Daring, in a quest to save Princess Daphne. The game presents predetermined animated scenes, and the player must select a direction on the joystick or press the action button in order to clear each quick time event, with different full motion video segments showing the outcome.[10] A perfect run of the 1983 arcade game with no deaths lasts no more than 12 minutes. In total, the game has 22 minutes or 50,000 frames of animated footage, including individual death scenes and game over screens.
> If the user is locked to a path, the game is called a "track ride". If the user can do whatever they want, it's an open-world game. Resolving that dichotomy is hard
Actual generative AI (as opposed to that in the OP) holds promise in solving this conflict by being the story teller in place of the game designer. I'm curious to know what's happening in this space.
I think I could not get past this after a couple of cinematic sequences in Uncharted 2. I just wanted to go to youtube and watch the cinematics stitched together uninterrupted.
There was this point in game development where a big technical goal was to make the transition from cinematic to gameplay and back seamless. Now that it's a given in games I personally am not wowed anymore. Maybe for each of us the balance of challenging gameplay and rewarding cinematics/feel of accomplishment lies on this spectrum and these type of cinematic heavy games went too far on the spectrum towards interactive movie and just don't appeal to some of us. I am reminded of Dragon's Lair in arcades which was all quicktime events and was appalling to me for the 2-4x the price of other arcade games but other people I went with loved this type of challenge.
Mobile Phone games are suited for that kind of gameplay (and Dragon's Lair has been re-released for iOS I read), everything old is new again I guess :)
Turns out you were right, it used compressed bitmaps. But the inspiration piece for Eric Chahi was correct:
> ERIC CHAHI: The polygon idea came from playing the Dragon's Lair port for the Amiga, which was showing incredible big animation on the screen, thanks to Randy Linden. That game's graphics weren't polygons, but were compressed bitmaps directly read from the disk. This was revolutionary for the time.
> I thought it could be done with polygons since the animation was flat. I wrote a vectorial code and programmed some speed tests. The idea was to use polygons not only for movie like animation but also for gameplay sequences. Think of the sprites as an assemblage of vector shapes. This proved to be a major advantage because you had big sprites that were scalable which took up less disk space than traditional sprites.
A lot of people rag on Dragon's Lair (and similar) for being "just a pretty movie with occasional interaction" instead of a game. But modern games are full of Quick Time Events (QTE)s which are spiritually the exact same thing.
(I still have the announcer's voice calling out "DRAGON'S LAIR!" in the attract mode seared in my memory).
> We were staying in a hotel or motel, and it was either attached to or had a small arcade of its own.
For people who didn't grow up during the 80s arcade boom. Arcades where everywhere. It was basically expected that every place that sold anything would have at least 1 arcade game. Grocery store? Check. Tanning Salon? Sure thing. Strip mall? Why, they'll have 2 complete deluxe arcades.
It was a looooong time from the death of Arcades to modern smart phones before we had something to do while hanging around most stores again.
The gathering crowd around an awesome play of a game really did happen back then. It's like the scene from Tron where Flynn is playing in his arcade. It was actually like that.
My older brother could play epic multi-hour long games of some kind of game I can't remember the name to (I think it was Pengo), racking up so many extra men that he could go for a bathroom break mid-game and let some scruffy novice kid (usually me) break in and play at the advanced levels for a couple minutes. The convenience store he played in would be packed with 20 or 30 people watching history happen. It gave every small town a local hero they could cheer for and every local hero felt like a minor god for the length of their quarter.
Great story, never got the chance to play Dragon's Lair on the arcade, but I did get to play Space Ace, the art/animation was amazing as one would expect from Don Bluth, particularly from that era when he did his (imo) finest work in the form of Secret of Nimh, but the simplistic game play mechanics left me disappointed.
As I recall, Don Bluth saw these laser games as simply a means to raise funds for his true love, animated feature films, meanwhile the producer Rick Dyer was truly passionate about the laserdisc game format and spent pretty much every penny of his Dragon's Lair and Space Ace earnings on his ill-fated Halcyon project.
Nintendo recently remade The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker for the Wii U, upgrading models and textures, and improving the lighting model in a bunch of ways.
Personally, I felt there was nothing wrong with the old lighting model, aside from being based on a fixed-function pipeline. The new lighting is full of bloom, gouraud shading, and other things which scream "HD NEXTGEN!!!!" but do not convey the original sense of cartooniness, like playing an immersively interactive Bluth animation. (No, the edited-together-in-real-time-movie Dragon's Lair doesn't really count.)
Wind Waker HD would have benefited by adopting the lighting model of, say, Ni no Kuni.
Hacker Cinema
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See also Dragon's Lair:
> Most games in the Dragon's Lair series are interactive films where the player controls Dirk the Daring, in a quest to save Princess Daphne. The game presents predetermined animated scenes, and the player must select a direction on the joystick or press the action button in order to clear each quick time event, with different full motion video segments showing the outcome.[10] A perfect run of the 1983 arcade game with no deaths lasts no more than 12 minutes. In total, the game has 22 minutes or 50,000 frames of animated footage, including individual death scenes and game over screens.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon%27s_Lair
> If the user is locked to a path, the game is called a "track ride". If the user can do whatever they want, it's an open-world game. Resolving that dichotomy is hard
Actual generative AI (as opposed to that in the OP) holds promise in solving this conflict by being the story teller in place of the game designer. I'm curious to know what's happening in this space.
I think I could not get past this after a couple of cinematic sequences in Uncharted 2. I just wanted to go to youtube and watch the cinematics stitched together uninterrupted. There was this point in game development where a big technical goal was to make the transition from cinematic to gameplay and back seamless. Now that it's a given in games I personally am not wowed anymore. Maybe for each of us the balance of challenging gameplay and rewarding cinematics/feel of accomplishment lies on this spectrum and these type of cinematic heavy games went too far on the spectrum towards interactive movie and just don't appeal to some of us. I am reminded of Dragon's Lair in arcades which was all quicktime events and was appalling to me for the 2-4x the price of other arcade games but other people I went with loved this type of challenge.
People spent A LOT of time on "animated movies" like Dragon's Lair and Space Ace, Monument Valley is better I guess :)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon%27s_Lair_(1983_video_game)
Mobile Phone games are suited for that kind of gameplay (and Dragon's Lair has been re-released for iOS I read), everything old is new again I guess :)
Turns out you were right, it used compressed bitmaps. But the inspiration piece for Eric Chahi was correct:
> ERIC CHAHI: The polygon idea came from playing the Dragon's Lair port for the Amiga, which was showing incredible big animation on the screen, thanks to Randy Linden. That game's graphics weren't polygons, but were compressed bitmaps directly read from the disk. This was revolutionary for the time.
> I thought it could be done with polygons since the animation was flat. I wrote a vectorial code and programmed some speed tests. The idea was to use polygons not only for movie like animation but also for gameplay sequences. Think of the sprites as an assemblage of vector shapes. This proved to be a major advantage because you had big sprites that were scalable which took up less disk space than traditional sprites.
See this interview: http://eboredom.20m.com/features/interviews/chahi.html
Another World is also one of my favorite games. I still remember the day in 1991 when I played it for the first time.
A lot of people rag on Dragon's Lair (and similar) for being "just a pretty movie with occasional interaction" instead of a game. But modern games are full of Quick Time Events (QTE)s which are spiritually the exact same thing.
(I still have the announcer's voice calling out "DRAGON'S LAIR!" in the attract mode seared in my memory).
> We were staying in a hotel or motel, and it was either attached to or had a small arcade of its own.
For people who didn't grow up during the 80s arcade boom. Arcades where everywhere. It was basically expected that every place that sold anything would have at least 1 arcade game. Grocery store? Check. Tanning Salon? Sure thing. Strip mall? Why, they'll have 2 complete deluxe arcades.
It was a looooong time from the death of Arcades to modern smart phones before we had something to do while hanging around most stores again.
The gathering crowd around an awesome play of a game really did happen back then. It's like the scene from Tron where Flynn is playing in his arcade. It was actually like that.
My older brother could play epic multi-hour long games of some kind of game I can't remember the name to (I think it was Pengo), racking up so many extra men that he could go for a bathroom break mid-game and let some scruffy novice kid (usually me) break in and play at the advanced levels for a couple minutes. The convenience store he played in would be packed with 20 or 30 people watching history happen. It gave every small town a local hero they could cheer for and every local hero felt like a minor god for the length of their quarter.
I've always, always hated Dragon's Lair.
I hated how people would marvel at the "great graphics!" I hated how unreliable the game was (it was always broken -- the stupid laser disc).
I liked it as a movie... but it was lame as a game.
Great story, never got the chance to play Dragon's Lair on the arcade, but I did get to play Space Ace, the art/animation was amazing as one would expect from Don Bluth, particularly from that era when he did his (imo) finest work in the form of Secret of Nimh, but the simplistic game play mechanics left me disappointed.
As I recall, Don Bluth saw these laser games as simply a means to raise funds for his true love, animated feature films, meanwhile the producer Rick Dyer was truly passionate about the laserdisc game format and spent pretty much every penny of his Dragon's Lair and Space Ace earnings on his ill-fated Halcyon project.
Nintendo recently remade The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker for the Wii U, upgrading models and textures, and improving the lighting model in a bunch of ways.
Personally, I felt there was nothing wrong with the old lighting model, aside from being based on a fixed-function pipeline. The new lighting is full of bloom, gouraud shading, and other things which scream "HD NEXTGEN!!!!" but do not convey the original sense of cartooniness, like playing an immersively interactive Bluth animation. (No, the edited-together-in-real-time-movie Dragon's Lair doesn't really count.)
Wind Waker HD would have benefited by adopting the lighting model of, say, Ni no Kuni.