Dragon’s Lair
The same way you beat any game in the 1980s and early '90s: lots of pattern memorization based on trial and error. In the arcade, that means lots of quarters.
Once a game like Dragon’s Lair was memorized, you could play through the entire thing on only a couple quarters, to the astonishment of arcade bystanders.
Kids and teenagers had more time back then because smart phones and Instagram and YouTube didn’t exist. People underestimate what a huge time sink those can be.
No one had Internet access. You could play a game, play an instrument, read a book, go to the mall and the arcade and maybe catch a movie, go outside, or watch whatever happened to be on the 3-4 network TV channels (or possibly cable if your family had the money). And TV back then was mostly terrible.
So if you had $10 in your pocket, that was an entire afternoon of entertainment at the arcade and movie theater.
If you had it down you could beat Dragon’s Lair (and Space Ace, and the other Laserdisc games) with a single credit. IIRC there is no randomization within each scene; the only element of randomness was which out of a set of three scenes could play stemming from completing the previous scene. Once you’ve seen them all they always play out the same way. Further, each scene is only played once per complete game.
$3.10 minimum wage in 1980. Equivalent to ~$11.50 per hour today, higher than today’s minimum wage.
As a child in the 90s, I remember Saturday and Sunday afternoons being incredibly boring if we didn’t go out. TV was shit (still is), and on rainy afternoons you were basically locked at home.
By the late 90s, at age 10, with no internet access in my county, I was mapping ways to beat the Water Temple in Ocarina of Time. I remember scheming for hours, using Farore’s Wind to take me to the beginning of the dungeon and jumping to the platform on the 2nd floor. This way, I was not using the only key I had on the middle pillar, which is what almost everyone got stuck on.
But yeah, I remember the tail-end of this at that time and starting a whole new game to try this out. And it worked. Still proud of 10 year old me. It’s interesting but I hadn’t felt boredom in a really long time.
I grew up in that time frame. Normally people would swarm around the machine and give advice.
Arcades were very social when it came to certain games.
Hot games were awesome, they were like new events. Everyone gathering around giving advice and tall tales, trying to secure a spot to play, showing off and being excited when that one kid definitely knew what they were doing, it was a lot of fun.
For us I remember Mortal Kombat, NBA Jam, Blitz, and Tekken being the major ones. And then the lesser ones like Virtual Fighter, whatever racing game was new, and just because it was completely ridiculous the Aerosmith shooter where you shot discs at bad guys lol
Ridge Racer was awesome and just so much better than the other racing games at the time. Especially when you put the camera just a few inch from the asphalt.
When the small grocery store in my area got Super Mario Brothers there were always 4 or 5 people queue’d up and playing it. That store was a basic grocery story but they did cater to youth with expendable change. Lots of the bulk candies; a few different kinds for 5c, better ones for 10c, good mini candies for 25c… etc
Before or after school, that place always had kids spending some change on something. Once the NES became a household item, that store changed dramatically
The corner convenience store had the magazines right across from the arcade machines. You’d okay a few rounds of street fighter or mortal Kombat, then sneak in a pork at the gaming mags before the clerk would complain.
I could never get the game going. Something about putting your quarters in at the right moment. Sucked every weekend I went to try play that game and never could.
If I remember it was either 50cents or a dollar. It wasn’t a quarter when it came out.
To put that in perspective McDonald’s was line three something a value meal and minimum wage was about the same. It wasn’t a cheap game
you try to not play any arcade if you haven’t seen anyone else play first, that cost you money :) My experience with Dragons Lair is that it was a nice game to watch, and a bad game to play, it was expensive and as someone else said in the thread it requires you to memorize the movements, it was never random
As an interactive method of storytelling, I think they’re fine (but not my thing). I think the problems really emerge when you try to combine them with the revenue-driving elements of an arcade machine - the challenges need to be designed to kill you so you’ll keep paying rather than giving you choice or staking you in to the story further.
It wasn’t that hard if you kept feeding it quarters. It took a lot of trial and error, but having infinite lives means it was eventually beatable.
This is the real answer. Arcade games weren’t made to be beaten, they are made to extract maximum quarters. Most of these games don’t even have a real “ending”, and why would the devs bother? They already got your money.
It wasn’t a case of “why bother,” it was a case of evolution.
The original intent of arcade video games was to obtain a high score. You played until you died, and the game progressively got harder until you choked, or it hit some arbitrary limit of difficulty and went on forever, or in some infamous cases (Pacman) crashed. These video games were a conceptual extension of the arcade games that existed before: Pinball machines. Pinball games don’t have an end state, you play indefinitely for a high score until you choke.
Arcade video games could have endings, and even though in the very early days they didn’t: Crystal Castles was probably the first, in 1983. Even then, after reaching the “end” the game would loop so you could play it indefinitely until you died. Because that’s how arcade games worked. A lot of games starting from the 1990’s and beyond had endings of some description or another because they were in some way narrative based. In most cases (with the exception of some 1 on 1 fighters) you can still play another loop after the ending.
I assume lots of trial and error and following guides from magazines and such. Games like Dragon’s Lair aren’t really meant to be that winnable, they’re just designed to get you to buy as many coins as possible to keep trying.
