Great Game Stories, No. 10: The Knight Who Gathered a Shattered Star (Dragon's Lair)

Once upon a time there was a famous legend about a brave knight, a captured princess and a fire-breathing dragon in a wizard's castle. This is not quite that legend. This is Dragon's Lair, the 1992 Game Boy cartridge from Sony Imagesoft, and it is a curious, honest little side-scrolling platformer that shares almost nothing with the glorious hand-drawn arcade machine whose name it borrows. So rather than pretend, let us tell the story it truly tells, which turns out to be stranger than the legend.

Dirk the Daring: a knight with no sword and a great deal of optimism.

The Characters

Our hero is Dirk the Daring, a knight of great courage and, in this particular telling, almost no equipment whatsoever. He cannot swing a sword. He cannot cast a spell. He can walk, and he can jump, and with those two humble talents alone he must set the whole world right. It is the fairy tale of the underdog stripped right down to the bone, a champion armed with nothing but nerve and a good pair of boots.

Far away waits Princess Daphne, taken captive and longing to be rescued, the damsel at the centre of the tale. The long shadow over the land is cast by Mordroc, an evil lord hungry for power, whose barbaric army did a terrible thing at the very start of the story. And sleeping somewhere beyond the mountains lies a Dormant Knight, a slumbering champion whose awakening, curiously, turns out to be the true prize of the whole quest.

Now a word of honesty for anyone who loves the old arcade legend, and it is an important one. Singe, the famous fire-breathing dragon of the laserdisc cartoon, never once appears in this cartridge. There is no wizard's castle to storm, no dragon to slay and no flaming lair to escape. This Game Boy tale marches to an entirely different drum, and it is kinder to the player to say so plainly than to promise a dragon that never comes.

Princess Daphne, waiting in another castle. Sound familiar?

The World

The kingdom of this game is a land of platforms, ledges and gentle peril that scrolls quietly past as Dirk journeys onward. Most strikingly of all, it is a world almost entirely without monsters. There are no enemies to fight, and no weapons with which to fight them even if there were. The only true adversary is the geography itself: the gaps that must be leapt, the heights that must be climbed, the careful footing of a knight who lives or dies by his nimbleness rather than his steel.

Across all of this scattered landscape lie hundreds of glittering fragments, waiting from one end of the realm to the other. There are said to be 194 of them in total, a small galaxy of shards spread over hill and hollow and hidden ledge, and the patient gathering of them is Dirk's entire purpose in life. It is less a war than a very long, very careful treasure hunt across a beautiful and lonely country.

The Adventure

The tale begins, as the best ones do, with a treasure and a betrayal. Princess Daphne's caravan was carrying the mythical Life Stone, an ancient relic rumoured to grant its owner limitless power and eternal life. A traitor whispered this precious secret into the ear of Mordroc, whose army promptly fell upon the caravan, slew nearly everyone in it and carried the princess away into captivity.

It is worth pausing on how lonely a quest this really is. Dirk has no map, no guide and no companion at his shoulder, only the endless promise of one more shard glinting on the next ledge. He climbs and drops and doubles back across the same beautiful, empty country, and the game asks of him the plainest and hardest of virtues: not strength, not cunning, but sheer stubborn persistence. In a genre built on slaying things, here is a knight whose greatest heroism is simply refusing to give up and go home.

But in the last desperate moments before the ambush struck, a quick-thinking maid used what small sorcery she possessed and shattered the Life Stone into hundreds of pieces, flinging them far and wide across the length of the land so that no villain could ever hold its terrible power whole again. And so Dirk's long and lonely errand is set for him: to walk and to leap the entire breadth of the kingdom, patiently gathering up every last glinting shard of the broken stone before darkness can claim them.

Spoiler Alert: How It Ends

Here is where the story turns genuinely strange, and honesty demands we tell it straight. Once Dirk has finally collected every last Life Stone in the realm, he travels over the mountains to one final screen, and there he awakens the Dormant Knight, calling the sleeping champion back into life. And then the cartridge simply stops.

That, remarkably, is the ending. Dirk never confronts Mordroc. There is no dragon, no duel, no fiery cavern and no triumphant slaying. He does not, in the end, actually rescue Princess Daphne at all, and she remains a captive as the tale quietly closes. It is a cliffhanger in chainmail, a fairy tale that dutifully gathers every one of its pieces and then declines to finish its own sentence. Whether that makes it a charming curiosity or a small heartbreak is left entirely for the player to decide, but it is, at the very least, the true and complete story that this odd little cartridge actually has to tell.

Curious to meet this strange, gentle, sword-less knight for yourself? Step into the Game Boy Museum and find the cartridge in person, cliffhanger ending and all. Some of the best stories are the ones that surprise you.