Dragon's Lair
Coleco Adam, - 1984Published by: Coleco
Coleco paid a staggering up-front $2 Million dollar fee to license
Dragon's Lair for home use. They planned
a laser disc add-on system to the Colecovision that would retail for approximately
$150. It might have had to use a stylus rather than a laser beam to reduce costs,
but they were confident they could do it.
Somewhere along the line they realized it just wasn't going to
be affordable or practical to use an actual laser disc, so they opted to
create a game based on Dragon's Lair. After
all, the $2 Million was already spent!
The Coleco version actually came in two different forms: the Super Game Pack
and the disk version. The disk version comes with a beautiful manual.
There are 9 different screens implemented:
Falling Disk, Skull Hallway, Burning Ropes,
Weapons Room, Ramps, Tentacle Room, Checkerboard, Slaying Dragon.
The major difference between this version of the game and most of the
others is that the sequence is not predetermined. Although timing is just
as critical, the game is actually more interactive. For example, when you
are on the Falling Disk screen, an entity appears and
actually tries to blow you off the disk. You have to fight back with the
joystick. The appearance of this entity and the strength and direction of
the wind is random.
There was talk of a Colecovision cartridge version of this game (since
it runs on the basic Colecovision hardware) but it was not possible to fit
all of the elements into the constraints of a cartridge. You can well imagine
how much space it would take to implement all of the Available on Floppy Disk & Digital Data Pack.
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