We were looking into the marvelous recent project by [Throaty Mumbo] to recreate and reimagine the forgotten world of VHS-tape-based video games. Wait, what? Yes, back in the day, when computer graphics were more primitive, there were attempts to mix the gameplay of video games with the graphics from a video cassette. Take the Action Max system. It worked with a light-gun that pointed at the screen while the video played, and you tried to shoot at things as they flew by. Think Duck Hunt, but in glorious VHS video quality with cheesy acting, and the same gameplay loop every time, because it’s on the tape.
The unreleased Control-Vision VHS gaming system, co-developed with none other than Steve Wozniak, took the idea a little further and ran simultaneous sub-videos, and your actions would choose which of the sub-tracks would play at any given time. This let them do things like switch between videos depending on whether you caught the bad guys or missed them entirely, for instance.
These games came in the late 1980s, though, and they were all derivatives of the seminal Dragon’s Lair, which is probably the least fun video game I’ve ever had the chance to play, but among the most entertaining in a weird way. Instead of a linear VHS tape, Dragon’s Lair, and the later but equally unplayable Space Ace, were based on the then-new video disc technology that could swap between entirely different tracks almost seamlessly.
“Almost” is the key word here, though. Although the animations were absolutely marvelously cartoony, and looked stunning in an arcade up against video games of the time, there was a significant fraction of a second of delay between commanding an action with the joystick and the machine swapping up to the correct track. There were a couple of sections where back-to-back actions were necessary, and the challenge was to work around the game’s exact track-swapping-glitch time. As good as they looked, the gameplay was no fun.
But the game was influential, as evidenced by its VHS-based clones. If you’d like to give it a try, you’ll not be surprised to hear that there’s an emulator for Dragon’s Lair and its spin-off games.
What do all of these have to do with each other? We love how these games took a current technology – in this case video discs or video tapes – and tried to make it do something else: These games were all hacks. If you look at them in that light, maybe you can look past the horrible acting in Night Trap or the frustrating glitches in Dragon’s Lair. (Or maybe not. Give me Robotron: 2084 any day.)
When growing up, the family would often play board game and quiz shows utilizing DVDs. They were essentially a way to run the logic of the traditional point based systems but digitally, allowing for say, playing clips of the film rather than reading a quote on a physical index card. I’m also reminded of many times in education systems where Teachers would run essentially PowerPoint prevention slideshows, but they could build the format to be the shape and style of Jeopardy. It was essentially just individual slides per question and answer and then a dynamic question board slide, but to anyone who wasn’t a nerd you’d be forgiven for not even realizing it. Years later I saw some content creators doing it with modern video game quizzes testing friends and colleagues and I got a huge wave of nostalgia. I love utilizing CHYOA branching path systems because you can get as much as you put into it.
You want the weirdest video game that was a hack you have to travel forward in time a few years to 1991 when Rick Dyer, maker of Dragons Lair, released his forth game, TIME TRAVELER, which used a hemispherical mirror to create the first “holographic” video game.
I’m the reason why that game is emulated in MAME, and it isn’t even slightly the weirdest video game. What you’re thinking of is Thayer’s Quest, which is also emulated there. Whereas Time Traveler was more or less a series of quick-time events driven by a joystick, Thayer’s Quest was a LaserDisc game driven by not just a joystick, but an arcade cabinet with a keypad where you could enter your own name, owing to a second-generation Votrax speech-synthesizer chip.
When it comes to obscurity and peak weirdness, Thayer’s Quest sits pretty squarely at the top.
I dont care if your Rick Dyer himself,
Your mame claim is meaningless to me.
I was NOT thinking of thayer’s quest. There was nothing particularly strange about that. It was just another laserdisc game Like space ace, and dragons quest.
Time Traveller’s pseudoholographic display is what I found of interest and what I wanted to, and did discuss. It stands out, even now, and one of the weirdest arcade games ever created.
I played a cowboy version of what you’re describing at one point in the past. It was a wonderful experience, but a pretty horrible game. I’m guessing Time Traveler was similar.
Mad Dog McCree! I remember that one. The light gun response was terrible but it was at least somewhat playable.
While not a VIDEO Game, a favorite “hack” game of mine was the 1978 2XL robot that used 8 track tapes as a primitive “smart toy,” asking trivia questions and telling jokes using 4 front selection buttons (Q, Yes/True, More/Info, No/False)
FUN FACT: Battletoads, made by the brother Tim and Chris Stamper, actually hacked the Nintendo to get splitscreen to work. It wasn’t a feature the NES was ever meant to pull off.
Games with VHS technology were also money pits, usually $1 a play, which was a hard pill for a casual arcade player to swallow. Who knows where it is with inflation now.
Dr Mario was split screen
That’s…. not the same thing. “Split-screen” in this instance means two instances of the same game running simultaneously. DR. Mario is one instance with player control on two sides. I know that’s a bit facetious but programmers can explain the difference with more annoying detail than I can.
Queue random programmer banter in 3…. 2….
They hacked it? The hardware? The ROM? What?
They reverse engineered the Famicom because Nintendo was stingy about providing specs to a unproven Western developer.
A cool video game hack? Tim and Chris Stamper of Rare had to hack the NES/Famicom to get it to pull off splitscreen – it wasn’t a feature the machine was built to do.
VHS Games were also money pits. $1 a play for Dragon’s Lair was ludicrous – and with inflation? Ugh…
One cool thing about Dragon’s Lair though – if you recognize the art style, it was by the late great Don Bluth, also known for Rats of NIMH and (the original) Land Before Time.
My apologies — he’s still alive! D’oh!
Hey, it beats “late great Hannibal Lecter”
And definitely beats an uneditable double post. Bah! >_<
Dragon’s Lair looked so cool when I first saw it, then I played it and it felt like the biggest rip off/scam…
“As good as they looked, the gameplay was no fun.” I learned about Dragon’s Lair when it was new but never saw it. I was fascinated by the luxuriant stills. Not so long ago I looked up a playthrough on YouTube. I don’t think there’s as much as five minutes of actual gameplay in there if you manage to get everything right.
Also the “rescue the pretty helpless princess” plot has been decried as sexist. I found a parody cartoon once in which a dragon is cowering at the back of its treasure chamber crying and holding his sore tail while a tall princess, dressed largely in jewellery, scolds a weedy knight who barely comes up to her navel: “And who the hell ASKED YOU to come and HURT that poor, defenseless, noble, tender, loving, weak, magnificent, intelligent, unselfish, jewelled and VERY RICH dragon, just because according to you I’m in DANGER?”
Ever met a spoiled rich girl who was sheltered her whole life? Who was bathed by servants, dressed by servants, had her every need met by servants?
Pretty helpless princess tends to be the reality.
Now lets add the next layer,
Unless youre Patty Hearst, kidnapping victims generally tend to be pretty pathetic, broken, and in need of rescue.
Now while most kidnapped Noblewomen’s families relied on courts, royal petitions, and political negotiations rather than lone knights charging into a castle….when we look at other kidnappings, and the armed forces that respond and rescue them, these groups are largely comprised of MEN.
So sorry if you fantasize about some genderflipped reality in which liam neeson’s daughter busts out elite BJJ skills and defeats the kidnapping attempt ending the movie in the first few minutes, or a world in which Jessica Buchanan and Private Jessica Lynch dug deep and conquered their captors unaided rather than needing to be rescued by Seal teams Army Rangers, Delta Force, and/or Pararescuemen….none of which were WOMEN.
Sorry, but thats just not the reality.
Dude, whether or not that view of history is accurate doesn’t change how over-used the trope was in games and literature. Plots tend to lose their entertainment value after the 500th rehash. And it sucks if an overwhelming majority of the characters that resemble you in fiction are powerless victims.
every plot is over used in fiction. Almost all fiction is a permutation of 7 basic plots, Overcoming the monster, Rags to riches, the quest, voyage and return, comedy, tradgedy, and rebirth. And lets be real, the overwhelming majority of characters that resemble you in real life are powerless victims as well. Whining about the patriarchy isnt going to change that.
Yeah, the animation looks good but the story… it has aged as well as milk outside in a Texas summer. I mean the original Metroid’s big twist was “hey look! girls can shoot!” (that’s not trashing the game, just acknowledging the reality of the time period.)
Dragon’s Lair and Space Ace remind me of the evenings and nights spent at the arcades in the mid ’80s, though i can’t recall liking them aside the looks: visually astounding for the era, but calling them games was quite a stretch. I think I played the former only once and never played the latter.
You didn’t miss much. I usually saved my quarters for Street Fighter. Or a good beat-em-up like the (original Konami arcade) Simpsons game. At least that money pit was enjoyable.
I saw a guy play Dragon’s Lair with his back mostly turned to the screen. The game was so predictable that he would just look shortly at any new scene, see what it was, then he would turn his back and operate the joystick and the button without looking further at the screen until he had finished that scene.
Alright…let’s not forget Captain Power back in the say. You could use the toys and they would sync with the cartoon flash rate. I had an ActionMax system. The good ol’ cheat was shooting towards the red Lamp Suction Cup that had the photo transistor or CDS cell in there. Back in 1983, I worte a tap game with a home made light pen and my VIC-20. Let’s just say the computer teacher back in Gradeschool hated me with a passion. Come Junior High, I would sneak Radio Electronics magazines in my text books like the jocks would hide centerfold pictures. Than’s for the memories there, Elliot
in 2002 UBIsoft released a remake called Drangon’s Lair 3D with more rooms and now the control of Dirk is in real time and you can use a gamepad. It is a pretty decent game, much better than the original.
I would love to see Mumbo do a port of Dragon’s Lair to his VHS-based arcade system. It would be second most-interesting port of that game after porting the arcade version of the game to the 2600.
People have been asking for the 2600 port since the Moviecart was first announced. The Moviecart was featured here, it’s a 2600 cartridge with some kind of computing substrate inside that allows it to stream very low resolution and badly-colored videos to the 2600’s line buffer. It’s definitely a case of “it’s amazing that it’s happening at all”, but a port of one of the Laserdisc arcade games would have been the ultimate triumph. I’m guessing that there might be an issue with randomly accessing chapters in the file, but that seems like a strange limitation.
“The gameplay was no fun” unless you spent WAY too much time between college classes watching other people play, then memorizing every correct move, then practicing and perfecting those moves, then making it all the way to the final boss scene and purposely allowing yourself to be killed on the last possible move so that you could rack up more points and then finally slay the dragon on your last life and nail the highest score the game allowed!
Or so I’ve heard 😆
Very nice!
Zoid (yes, that Zoid) tried to show off his Dragons Lair skills to me one day in ~1989/1990. It wasn’t his day.
A Wozniak tape-game thing eh. Now we finally get an insight why Apple lost their believe in games being a thing.
I loved Dragon’s Lair! Of course it helped that I worked for an arcade company and could play it for free. But it wasn’t just me that loved it, those machines brought in a LOT of money. One of the biggest money makers we had. Until the skill crane machines came along…
” One of the biggest money makers we had.”
yeah considering it cost 0.50 to play, and it was easier to die then to progress…..I bet it was
The laser disk / game system concept remained in play (heh) well into the early 2000’s in casinos with Video Roulette. The system consisted of two large projection monitors. The first was horizontal under glass, serving as the table, with betting stations that had a trackball and buttons (and of course, payment units). The second screen was a large upright monitor to show the wheel. IIRC, there was a generic spin animation with the ball bouncing around, then it would switch track, and each number had a track with the ball “stuck” to the number, spinning down and stopping. There was also some switching and genlock hardware to play win animations and cutscenes on both monitors.
Probably the best implementation of the laserdisk game system concept was Firefox from 1983, based on the movie. I say “best” because it had better gameplay than simply well timed joystick moves (or maybe it was just my primitive kid brain thought it was cool!). The laser disk played various videos of terrain clips and you played as the pilot shooting enemies. I don’t honestly remember if the enemy planes were part of the video or CG. And you were not flying (other than the occasional course choice). You were simply aiming. But it at least FELT like you were in constant control of the action rather than waiting for a timing.
I only got to play it a couple of times and never saw the machine again, so my memory of it is not the best. It may very well have been that the enemy planes were included in the video and you really did need to simply wait for well timed shots. I dont remember getting beyond stage two or so.
OMG I remember my dad playing that, thanks for the mention, completely forgot that one
Here’s one more on-topic hack: Max Payne.
When the developers at Remedy were showing a publisher how the game rendered bullets, they programmed a debug function that slowed down the game so the investors could see it easier. When this happened, the people watching were like:
“Whoa! That’s cool! You can slow time?”
Hence the Bullet Time mechanic was born when the developers, improvising said….. “Oh…. yeah! We did that! Totally a feature.”