Recently, a local arcade we frequent called Flip Off (see: Flip Off Arcade – Puyallup, Washington – Customer Review) added Dragon’s Lair.
In 2020, Netflix inked a deal with Ryan Reynolds (Deadpool) to star as Dirk the Daring in a live action Dragon’s Lair movie. In November 2022, Reynolds indicated they had been working on it for two years and teased a few more details.
Reynolds went on to describe the Dragon’s Lair adaptation as a “living, breathing thing as opposed to just a piece of entertainment you watch.” He also pointed out that his production company, Maximum Effort, has been working on the project for the last two years which was part of the original report back in 2020. What he means by a living, breathing thing is a hard thing to nail down, but given Netflix’s experimentation with interactive series like the Bandersnatch special from their series Black Mirror and the fact that the original Dragon’s Lair game was an adventure game that tasks players with making quick decisions on where to go as part of an animated movie, it’s not impossible that the adaptation will retain the original’s gameplay as an interactive movie on the streaming service.
Ryan Reynolds Reveals New Details on Dragon’s Lair Netflix Adaptation (collider.com)
This project is more interesting to me than playing mobile games through Netflix (related: Netflix Starts Limited Testing Cloud Streaming Games In Canada and UK), because a live action Dragon’s Lair that you could control — if that’s what it is — that has potential.
Wonder if they will mix Don Bluth’s animation with the live action, sort of like they did with Garfield and some other live action + animation movies?
This past week at PGM we score chased Dragon’s Lair, see: Season 2 Week 24: Dragon’s Lair (Arcade) – How to Join Us, Play, Beat Your Personal Best and I picked up the Steam store Dragon’s Lair Trilogy bundle (approximately $20, 30% off) with Dragon’s Lair, Dragon’s Lair II: Time Warp and Space Ace. Plays well with very low hardware specs, btw, for fans wanting to play Dragon’s Lair on their PC and or play through their multicab arcade controls (which is where games like these shine).
A fair amount of extras come with the Steam version including some interesting interviews with the creators (although these are probably on YouTube somewhere), some early sketches and some Steam achievements, for those that chase those. Some of this I didn’t have in any other version of Dragon’s Lair purchased in the post, so that’s cool. Kind of seems a bit dated to me, but for those that were super into these LaserDisc games, there’s enough meat on these bones for $20 worth I think.
I might not be a huge fan of the game, but LaserDisc games at the time they were released were something never-before-seen, a new game genre! That was what it was like in the 80s and to some extent the 90s … innovation in game genres much beyond that has been minimal … yes, there were MMORPG, FPS … what other “new” genres? To me LaserDisc games were very niche, but extremely cool at the time … these days? We should be able to do much more full control of a cartoon or full motion video than ever was technically possible — or feasible — in 1983.
As for a Dragon’s Lair movie from Netflix? Not sure what we can expect here, as movies from the chilly N are often a mixed bag. Will this be something like Black Mirror: Bandersnatch (https://www.netflix.com/title/80988062) where viewers can control the movie?
It should be, after all. Whether or not Netflix and Reynold’s company deliver on that type of interactive DL movie remains to be seen. I would love to see a modern Dragon’s Lair with much, much more interaction than the original 1983 game.