Time Gal was one of their most memorable of FMV games. One such company was Taito, who pumped out a few unique titles with moderate success against the changing trends in the mid-80s, complete with original animation from Toei. In Japan though, a few publishers were keeping the genre alive. The little arcade nickelodeon shows had lost their luster, and their owners were going back to cheaper cabinets that didn’t require expensive laserdisc players with their high failure rates. Gamers were becoming sick of seeing the same animations over and over through the trial and error process of memorization. Even by the release of Bluth’s sequel title, its only contribution was more inputs at a faster clip with quicker reaction time, making the expensive game more of a quarter-muncher. A lot of the character and finesse that made Dragon’s Lair successful was stripped away as many titles haphazardly forced in input and battle sequences with little regard to flow. Instead many developers spliced and edited footage from films and anime into a more or less coherent mashing of stages to play through, such a Sega’s Astron Belt swiping from Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Message from Space, and Battle Beyond the Stars, and Stern’s Cliff Hanger using scenes from 2 Lupin III movies: Mystery of Mamo and Castle of Cagliostro. Despite many ambitious companies wanting in on the gold rush, not all of them had the backing of an ex-Disney animator’s studio to produce the video for their games. It wouldn’t take long for the market to get flooded with similar titles and for the novelty to wear off, leaving the new genre running out of steam by the time Space Ace debuted in 1984.Īnd it wasn’t from a lack of effort – no, scratch that, it was from a lack of effort. The gimmick of basically watching a short movie with bare interactive input to keep it rolling was astoundingly lucrative, with Don Bluth’s 10 minute animated fantasy short making 32 times its million dollar budget in 8 months. Pull back the proverbial curtain and the flashy magic trick turns out simple – and expensive: a laserdisc player hooked up with a CPU with the most rudimentary of coding to change video tracks on the fly (even less so if the game itself doesn’t bother keeping score). In an era where vector graphics and digitized voices were the pinnacle of programming and memory tech, Dragon’s Lair wowed gamers with visuals and sounds straight out of a cartoon – which it essentially was. It’s easy to imagine how powerful an impression laserdisc games left on arcade visitors in 1983.
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