Dragon's Lair: When Hollywood Animation Met a Grey Brick

If you wanted to invent the least likely candidate for a Game Boy game, you might land on Dragon's Lair. It began as an arcade cabinet that played back hand-drawn cartoon animation from a laserdisc, a machine so lavish it looked like a feature film you could steer. Turning that into a cartridge for a battery-powered handheld with a green screen was, on paper, absurd. Somebody did it anyway, and the result is one of the most fascinating what-were-they-thinking objects in the whole library.

Beautiful idea, brutal execution, unforgettable box art.

A cartoon you could play

The original Dragon's Lair arrived in arcades in 1983 and stopped people in their tracks. Its animation was directed by Don Bluth, a former Disney animator, and it looked like nothing else in a room full of blocky sprites: a real cartoon, full of character and colour, starring a hapless knight named Dirk the Daring on a quest to rescue a princess from a dragon. You did not move Dirk freely. Instead you watched the animation and pressed the right direction or the sword button at the right instant, nudging the film toward the next scene rather than the next grisly death. It was dazzling, and it ate coins for breakfast.

Impossible on the hardware

The catch is obvious. The magic of the arcade game was the laserdisc, a great disc of full-motion animation. The Game Boy had nothing remotely like it: a tiny cartridge, four shades of grey, and no way to stream cinematic footage. A faithful port was simply impossible. So the Game Boy Dragon's Lair did the only thing it could: it kept the name, the knight and the castle, and rebuilt everything else as a conventional side-scrolling platformer, with Dirk running, jumping and swinging his sword through the levels under your direct control.

In other words, it shares a title and a hero with the arcade legend but is really a different game wearing its clothes. That was true of most Dragon's Lair conversions of the era, on home computers and consoles alike, and the handheld version was no exception. What you got was an ambitious, good-looking platformer with a famous name on the box, rather than the interactive cartoon that made that name.

Ambition versus the brick

The Game Boy Dragon's Lair earned a reputation for being punishingly hard, in the grand tradition of its home-computer cousins, and opinions on it have always been split. But difficulty aside, it is exactly the kind of overreach that makes the handheld's catalogue so much fun to explore. It sits alongside other bold conversions in the collection, from the arcade blaster Space Invaders to the crowd-herding puzzler Lemmings, each one a case of developers refusing to accept that something could not be done on a Game Boy.

That spirit is really what this whole series has been about. A machine with four shades of grey and a screen the size of a matchbox somehow hosted mahjong and Pokemon, block-breakers and nonograms, arcade legends and Hollywood cartoons. Some of the results were masterpieces and some were glorious failures, but every one of them is a small monument to the idea that a great game does not need great hardware, only great imagination.

You can find Dragon's Lair in the Game Boy Museum collection. This article is part of the Great Games, Tiny Screen series.