Watching these Dragon’s Lair videos brought back a memory! I worked in Bluth’s Dublin studio in the late 80s/early 90s. I had just been promoted to the animation department and was at my desk on the 6th floor. Someone peeped in and said that the guys from the film lab had dug up the 35mm reels of ‘Dragon’s Lair‘ and ‘Space Ace’, and was going to run them in the screening room.
“Whoopee”, says I, “I’ll kill 40 or 50 minutes!” and off I went. We watched the footage on the big screen, something not many people have been lucky enough to do. It was amazing, way better than our work-in-progress, ‘Thumbelina‘. But too soon it was over – in under 10 minutes. To quote Sorbo, “Disappointed!” Even then I was aware that what we’d seen couldn’t have made a good game, as there just wasn’t enough footage. Not Don’s fault, a lot was down to the tech of the time, what could be stored on a laser disc, and the expense of classical animation of that quality. But that stuff that was animated was amazing!
Here are some cool images I collected online (sorry to the original posters, I’ve lost track of the sites that posted these originally). They give an idea of some of the graft required to set up the shots.
I’m reasonably sure that the blue sketch below was Don’s. Might be wrong, but that bold confident and fast line with strong straights/curves looks a lot like his style.
This video is about the extreme challenges of porting the Bluth games to floppy discs for the Amiga – the process of squeezing just a few more KB onto the old floppy disc format. Also, the animation had to be completely repainted in the Amiga’s iff format, as the laserdisc artwork was too high res. An amazing story in its own right.
Fast forward only 2 years (what a difference such a tiny span of time makes) and I was working in Glendale, CA, and was animation director for Creative Capers, a small studio that made CD-Rom games for Disney Interactive. We had some ridiculous limitations on animation there – for example, because DI was marketing to as many PCs as possible, the target platform specs were 486s, not exactly state of the art even in the mid 90s as the Pentiums were appearing. Anyway, we had tight drawing limitations, sizes, etc.; on most projects no two frames could exceed the area of two ATM /business cards! We had frame count limits – every drawing that went through the studio cost money as it was drawn by hand, cleaned up by hand, scanned, then checked, then painted, then taken by the programmers and turned into an interactive. Nothing we did held a candle style wise to Dragon’s Lair and Space Ace of course!
Anyway, all that is another post – the almost forgotten hand-drawn animated CD-Rom games of the mid 90s, barely even ten years long, if that. BTW, I made a short series of courses assembled from some of my Linked-Learning courses covering my memories of directing CD-Rom games in the 90s. One for platform games, and a much shorter one for isometrics.
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