When Dragon's Lair was originally released in the arcades back in 1983, it was one of the most visually impressive and technologically advanced titles available. Utilizing the latest in LaserDisc technology, the game was capable of streaming and presenting a series of high-quality animated sequences (created by the expert animators at Don Bluth Productions) to tell an interactive story about the courageous knight Dirk the Daring and his mission to save the Princess Daphne from the lair of an evil Dragon named Singe.
For players visiting the arcade in the early '80s, it was unlike any arcade game they had ever seen before and was considered to be a million miles ahead of its competition in terms of its graphics and animation, featuring fully animated characters as opposed to pixel-based sprites. So, when it came to the process of porting it to other less powerful machines, it created a pretty huge problem for those who had been asked to convert it. Namely, how do you create something that emulates the same experience but on a platform that has far greater memory constraints and a lot more graphical limitations to contend with?
For some developers, the solution to this was a relatively simple one. They just told themselves that it was impossible from the very beginning and chose instead to create their own original adventures that borrowed characters and elements from the game's story but that had very little in common with the actual arcade gameplay. But, for others, this was simply an option they weren't willing to take, with the developers instead wanting to prove that a port was possible on their respective machines, even if they had to sacrifice some of the fidelity of the original. This brings us to the topic of today's article — Digital Eclipse's phenomenal Game Boy Color port of Dragon's Lair from 2001 — which remarkably managed to fit almost all of the arcade classic onto a single 4MB cartridge.
Like many online, we were shocked when we initially discovered that there was a functional port of the Dragon's Lair on the Nintendo handheld, and have been curious ever since to learn how Digital Eclipse was able to pull this off. So recently we took the time to talk with the Digital Eclipse president Mike Mika (who served as the creative director on the project) and the independent tools programmer Daniel Filner (who collaborated with Digital Eclipse on the game), to find out a little more about how they made this surprisingly faithful version of the arcade hit.
According to Mika, the idea of porting Dragon's Lair to the Game Boy Color first came about thanks to his brother Jeremy, who had created a compression tool that allowed the studio to include full-motion video in the company's handheld tie-in for the movie Tarzan. Impressed with the results, the team inside Digital Eclipse decided they wanted to push the technology even further on their next game, with the chief technology officer at the company Jeff Vavasour suggesting that they should try to make a port of Dragon's Lair.
At this point in time, there was already a Dragon's Lair game that had been released for the Nintendo Game Boy, called Dragon's Lair: The Legend. This was developed by the British company Elite Systems and was a reskin of their 1985 ZX Spectrum platformer Roller Coaster, with its main character being swapped out for the Dragon's Lair Dirk the Daring and the developers giving the amusement park background of the original title a medieval overhaul. Because of this, it wasn't exactly considered to be the most faithful port of the game, leaving the door open for Digital Eclipse to release a version for Game Boy Color that was much closer to the original design — that is, if it was willing to accept the challenge.
For Mika, this seemed like a perfect idea. He had always been a huge fan of Dragon's Lair, remembering in vivid detail the first time he ever laid eyes on the machine at the Meijer Thrifty Acres supercenter in Michigan.
"It took me a while to realize I was actually looking at a game," he tells Time Extension. "Back then, before machines could play video digitally in the way we know it today, it was pure magic. From my perspective, I didn't know if the player had direct control or not. It didn't matter. Now we think of it as a big quick-time event game, but back then, it was cutting edge, and even though it wasn't as visceral as it may have seemed at first blush, it was still great fun."
Despite readily accepting the challenge of porting Dragon's Lair, Digital Eclipse was under no impression that converting it to the Game Boy Color was going to be an easy task. After all, there were a lot of limitations that the studio would either need to overcome or create workarounds for first. To start, the handheld device was only capable of displaying 256 tiles (comprised of 8x8 pixel tile sets), which meant you couldn't fill the screen entirely with unique art and would have to reuse tiles wherever possible.
In addition to this, there were also several limitations placed on the amount of colours that you could use for each tile, with the sprites and backgrounds each having 8 4-color palette groups to draw from. That meant that developers could only realistically display 56 colours simultaneously — 32 for the background and 24 for the sprites (the first color of each 4-color sprite palette was considered transparent and wouldn't be drawn on screen).
Together these limitations would make recreating the art and animation from the arcade machine an almost impossible task, and that's without mentioning additional problems it would potentially face elsewhere with storage. Even the largest and most expensive Game Boy Color ROM cartridges only had an 8MB ROM storage, meaning the team would need to convince a publisher to pay for a larger cart size — something that could potentially prove tricky.
Undeterred by these issues, the team got to work putting together a proof-of-concept demo, featuring the game's protagonist Dirk walking across a drawbridge and evading a tentacled monster. The demo didn't have any sound but was enough to impress Rick Dyer, the original creator of Dragon's Lair, who eventually permitted Digital Eclipse to continue working on the port and connected the studio with the publisher Capcom (which was attached to release Dragon's Lair 3D at the time).
Upon seeing it, Capcom immediately expressed an interest in publishing the port, and even committed to paying for a larger 4MB ROM cartridge, to give the team a greater data allowance.
As Mika remembers, "Capcom went for it pretty quickly. Even though the game would be on a larger-than-normal cartridge, they were excited to do it. So we didn't really have to go out and pitch the game, if I recall correctly. I know we showed it to a lot of publishers as a way to show off what we could do, but we were already signed by that point."
After signing with Capcom, the team debuted this short demo to the public at the Classic Gaming Expo in August 1999, generating excitement and amazement from those who saw it. It was now official, Dragon's Lair was coming to the Game Boy Color, with the studio expecting to have it out by the following December. It was at this point that Mika and his brother Jeremy were pulled away to work on other projects, leading the company to bring on board Cathryn Mataga as the game's lead programmer.
Mataga was a veteran programmer, who was primarily known for her work in creating games for Atari 8-bit computers, including the 1982 flip-screen shooter Shamus, which she had also recently ported to the Game Boy Color in 1999. Her job would be to write the game's code and compress the data to make it fit within the available storage.
As for the art, the studio threw pretty much every artist it had at the project to create the 15 minutes of animation that would make up the game, but they had a trick up their sleeve. This came in the form of a newly developed tool for Windows called Tile Killer, which had been created by the developer Daniel Filner — an independent contractor who had previously worked with Digital Eclipse on Williams Arcades Greatest Hits for the Sega Mega Drive. Tile Killer served a bunch of distinct purposes. It would allow users to load bitmaps and edit them, convert bitmaps to tiles and maps (a process called "Tile Slicing"), edit tile sets and maps, and examine the data. It basically gave the team the ability to slice the frames of animation into pixel art and simultaneously reduce the number of colours being used, as well as the number of tiles, hence the name "Tile Killer".
Filner states, "The Game Boy Color opened up so many more possibilities but these carried their own limitations to consider. Let’s say you’re trying to do tile slicing on a piece of cartoon art that wasn’t created for the Game Boy. The art is highly colorful so it doesn’t comply with 4-colors-per-tile rules. Tilekiller would do something like this: Start by generating a wide palette for each tile, ignoring limitations - as many colors as needed - up to 64 colors if every pixel in the tile was unique. These wide palettes go into a palette bank, again ignoring limitations. So maybe you have 40 wide palettes now, and those wide palettes are all (let’s say) around a dozen colors - you’ve got 12x40 colors but you need 4x8 colors. Tilekiller would have to squish each wide palette down to 4 colors.
"One way I tried to do that was by measuring a ‘distance’ from each color to each other color, and then sort of a musical chairs process where one by one, the two remaining colors which are closest to each other get jammed together into one and then repeat until you are at your target palette size. Now the wide palettes have been reduced to compliant 4-color palettes… but you still have 40 of them. A similar process would measure which two palettes were closest to each other and then either drop one or combine them together into a wide 8-color palette and then resqueeze it down to 4. Then, for each tile in the tile bank, keeping in mind the original colors it was meant to be, it would check each surviving palette, to see which one would be best. Each pixel of the tile gets matched to whichever color in the palette seems closest to the correct color, and the sum of how far off each pixel’s assigned color is tells you how far off the whole tile is, if it were to use that palette."
The same process would then repeat for the tiles themselves, whittling them down to whatever spec the team was working towards. As Mika states, Tile Killer proved to be an incredibly useful tool for the art team but it wasn't a completely autonomous one. It also required an experienced artist to make several important decisions at various points in the process, deciding where best to allocate different colours or repeat tiles, in order to produce the best results.
"It wasn't just great tools, but great artists who understood how to maximize compression," Mika tells us. "Or where we could use less color or more solid and repeated tiles, or where it would benefit from needing less space. We gave out artists and animators strict data budgets. We might say that an entire animated sequence could only have 24k, and they'd go work away and whittle down the artwork until it just barely crossed the line. We'd make some areas of a background dither to black where the original may have had some detail, this was because we may have needed 25 bytes to make the scene fit. It was very hand-crafted like that. We were squeezing every last bit out of our ROM."
The result was a game that looked and played much closer to the arcade original than anyone could have ever anticipated, with the only major drawback being the game's sound, which had been drastically reduced to the fit the ROM size.
"Audio was the most impacted," says Mika. "We had to limit our sounds to very simple generated tones and a few select audio samples that were so much of what made Dirk's personality work. Grunts, groans, etc. I give Cathryn Mataga, our lead engineer, a lot of credit here, too. She found ways to make things compress that went above and beyond conventional techniques."
Dragon's Lair for the Game Boy Color was eventually released in the US in January 2001 (the European version launched later that same year in August), and generated a lot of positive press, with most journalists expressing shock that a studio was bold enough to try and replicate the experience of the laserdisc title on the Nintendo handheld.
In a Seattle Times article, Steven Kent, for instance, wrote that "Digital Eclipse [...] has achieved the un-understandable", calling the game "possibly the most impressive technological display ever created on Game Boy". IGN's Craig Harris, on the other hand, stated that "the Game Boy Color version is a stunner" and went on to state that "it works so well as a portable title that I can't help but recommend it".
To almost all who saw it, it was clear that Digital Eclipse had pulled off something truly impressive with its port, but the sales, unfortunately, didn't match this initial wave of good publicity with some in the press not helping matters by confusing it for a colourized port of Elite System's Dragon's Lair: The Legend.
As Mika recalls, "We were really proud of how much we pushed the hardware, [but] it really didn't sell that well originally. I think people didn't even look at it. I remember there were other versions of Dragon's Lair on Game Boy, but they were very different games than the arcade version. They were platform games that could have been any character or theme. One news outlet mentioned it briefly as 'a colourized version of the game you've already played before on Game Boy.' They couldn't have been more wrong!"
Fortunately, for Digital Eclipse, in the decades since then, its reputation has only grown, mostly thanks to YouTube Let's Plays and other videos that have introduced the port to a wider audience. If you haven't played Dragon's Lair for the Game Boy Color already, and are a fan of the original, we definitely recommend giving it a try to experience firsthand the incredible work that Digital Eclipse's did in order to bring the game to the legendary handheld.