Classic Dragon’s Lair comes to Blu-ray
Digital Leisure, a publisher of interactive video-based titles, has announced the coming release of Dragon’s Lair, the classic 1983 laserdisc video arcade game. The game will become the first-ever interactive title ever to be released for the Blu-ray Disc HD format using the Blue-ray Java environment.
Dragon’s Lair features hand-drawn animation and has players controlling the actions of Dirk the Daring, a valiant knight on a quest to rescue the fair princess Daphne from the clutches of an evil dragon and other treacherous monsters and obstacles that await in a medieval castle enchanted by a dark wizard.
Dragon’s Lair was one of the first laserdisc video games in the 80′s released by Cinematronics. The game was quite unlike any other game of its era, featuring polished Disney-like animation by Don Bluth. Most other games of the era represented the character as a sprite, which consisted of a series of bitmaps animated by playing them in succession. However due to hardware limitations of the era, artists were greatly restricted in the detail they could achieve using that technique; the resolution, frame rate and number of frames were severely constrained. Dragon’s Lair overcame these hardware limitations as the game’s hardware was based on a customized laserdisc player.
By using the laserdisc technology, the game copes with the massive storage requirements of high-resolution video and the inability of 80s-era arcade consoles to render high-quality animation in real-time. Choices made in game play caused the player to branch to a particular chapter on the disc playing back one of hundreds of different video clips. The game play was fairly limited, with inevitable delays caused by the laserdisc player’s chapter-seeking mechanism, but the visuals were quite stunning compared to any other game in its day.
Now, Dragon’s Lair has been digitally restored. Authoring studio Infinite HD and Digital Leisure transferred the video directly from the original film and cleaning it frame by frame. The disc will also include a restored Dolby Digital 5.1 surround track taken from the game’s original elements.
“I’ve seen the newly restored footage and it just looks amazing†says Don Bluth, original creator of Dragon’s Lair. “It looks even better than I can remember. The visuals, the 5.1 surround sound audio, all I can say is ‘Wow!’ Now a whole new generation can enjoy Dragon’s Lair all over again.â€
Unlike most current high definition releases, all of the special features on the disc were shot natively in 1080p at 24fps. These include brand-new interviews with creators Don Bluth, Gary Goldman and Rick Dyer, and for the first time a full length visual commentary of the game.
Digital Leisure has also announced an HD DVD version of ‘Dragon’s Lair,’ but has so far not scheduled a street date for the release.
Dragon’s Lair Blu-ray will be available April 9 at software and movie retailers, as well as online at www.digitalleisure.com. The company plans to follow up Dragon’s Lair Blu-ray with the release of Space Ace and Dragon’s Lair II: Time Warp in the Blu-ray Java format.
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