In my eleven years on social media, I have never once heard a single person trade a tale of Space Ace in arcades. They served as little more than novelties, or “attractions” for arcades. They’re famous for three things: being beautiful to look at, being difficult, and barely qualifying as video games. The look on his face was so precious, a look that continued later in the day when I threw the disc in and proceeded to get totally demolished by the games.ĭragon’s Lair, Space Ace, and Dragon’s Lair II: Time Warp are games that never stood a chance against the test of time. Fast forward to Christmas morning, 2010, and waiting for me under the Christmas tree, again from Dad, is Dragon’s Lair Trilogy for the Wii. We tried it on a game console but it kept clicking-through to the DVD control menu. Even Dad admitted that playing it with a DVD remote control was not the smartest idea. He threw it in and handed me the remote control (which was NOT a very good controller) and it was just about the worst thing I’d ever experienced in my life.
“Have I got a game for you!” Dad said to teenage me. Fast forward to the 2000s, when we ended up owning Dragon’s Lair on DVD.
I was born in 1989, and while Dragon’s Lair II: Time Warp technically counts as “my lifetime” really, two-year-old me wasn’t playing anything besides peek-a-boo by that point. 2023 marks the 40th Anniversary of Dragon’s Lair, a pioneer of “more fun to watch than play” gaming.