Dragon's Lair/Trivia

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Dragon's Lair

  • No Budget: Initially, this game was produced on a shoestring budget of $1 million. Only one professional actor was invited (and only the attract mode gives him showtime as a narrator), while the others have been voiced by the animators themselves; Dirk, for instance, was voiced by Dan Molina, the film editor, who in turn would later do the sounds for Fish Out of Water, and Daphne's voice originally belonged to Vera Lanpher, who was the head of the clean-up department. All the staff's soul they have put into the development, however, paid off magnificently.
  • Port Overdosed: Almost every console and computer in the 1980s got some version of Dragon's Lair, and the Laserdisc version has been ported many times, too, to Windows, early CD consoles, DVD players, and even the Game Boy Color (!). It is one of the most ubiquitous video games in history.

Dragon's Lair 2

  • Development Hell: Production on Dragon's Lair II started in 1983, but The Great Video Game Crash of 1983 caused Cinematronics to freeze royalties to Don Bluth's animation studio, driving them into bankruptcy and shelving the project for years before its eventual completion and release in 1991.
  • What Could Have Been: The prototype version of Dragon's Lair II, despite not having deleted scenes like its predecessor, actually had an entirely different soundtrack.