From the Original Dragon's Lair (Amiga) Team

[victors]

Hello Everyone!

Its fantastic to still see fans of Dragon's Lair, something that is near and dear to my heart!  Thanks to the admin that runs this site which I recently just stumbled upon randomly. :-)

Just to give you a bit of background, my name is Victor Sue and I was one of the original graphic artists for the Amiga version of DL!  I'm responsible for the Balls room and also the ending sequence where Singe is chasing Dirk and where Dirk finally slays the evil dragon and gets a big fat kiss from Princess Daphne! :-)

If you're interested, I'd be happy to share my experiences working on this fantastic project and answer any questions that you may have had about its development (Amiga version).

I don't think any of it has ever been revealed or told publicly, so hopefully over the next while I can share a bit of history with the remaining fans of the game! 

Yes, I have interesting tidbits of info on David, Randy, Mark, Pat, Kenneth, Bernie, Jim, and the rest that worked on the game. :-)  More to come...

Cheers,

Victor
(One of the original D.Lair team!

[DarthNuno]

Hi Victors, and a warm welcome to you on this board 

Woow... It's ... a ... dream comes true  We'll have now the opportunity to ask questions directly to the original team who've done the wonderful Amiga port of our favorite game FANTASTIC   

Of course, I'll prepare for you a list of questions/ ... and we've a lot things to ask, believe me 

Believe me or not but... I bought an Amiga because I saw the Dragon's Lair Demo on it ... true !!! And I'm sure I'm not the only one !

The first question is for me... Back in the day, I got Dragon's Lair and also Escape from Singe's Castle on Amiga, and ... believe me or not, but I bought an Amiga Hard Drive (20 MB if I remember well...and very expensive at the time) in order to install all the disks from both games on it, because I wanted fast access and all the stages together... but ... I wasn't able to make it work....    ...and ... what

Ok OK !!! I stop the 'fan boy' stories       I'll prepare the real questions 

Many thanks to giving us the opportunity to talk to you directly Victors 

I hope you'll have some good time here.. there's a lot of Dragon's Lair stuff on this board 

The questions/interview very soon 

[victors]

Hi DarthNuno, thanks for the warm welcome! 

I hope I can share some interesting stories and tidbits of information on the history and making of the Amiga version that has never been shared.  Honestly, I don't know what ever happened to all the great guys that contributed to the making of it!  They all sort of disappeared! 

Most of the graphics that were done for the game were done on EA's classic Deluxe Paint.  I remember each of the team members were provided with a video of the game (taken from the original LD - I still have mine on Betamax tape!) as well as frame by frame captures of each scene on floppies.  I was lucky enough to get the fun Balls room and the ending sequence! 

The original frame capture was layered in Deluxe Paint, and our task was to create a 16 (?) colour palette version of it.  Each frame was manually redrawn by hand!  That meant LOTS of work and lots of frames for just a few seconds of animation (remember this was before MPEG and auto-tweening existed).  I think we were paid something like $1 Canadian per frame.

The original animation that I did for the ending "Dirk Kissed by Daphne" sequence had a fantastic number of 'sparkles' that took me forever to draw!  Each one had to be pain-stakenly tracked to know if the sparkle was growing or shrinking.  I was actually damn proud of that beautiful animation (trust me, it was lots of work!)  Sadly, in the end ALL the sparkles had to be removed to allow the game to fit onto the 8 floppies!   I think I still have the original Kao-Didak floppies with the 'sparkles' version somewhere.  I'd be surprised if they haven't demagnetized by now... I'll have to try to dig that up for y'all

Okay.. continue this again shortly : )

Cheers,
Victor

[slowcade]

I have a special floppy controller for PC, and an application which tries to read bad sectors over and over. It's amazing how much it can salvage, more than 90% of my 4-500 Amiga floppies from 1990-94 were ok. I just converted them to disk images last week. 
Let me know if you need some help, seeing the original animations would be wonderful! 

[brian]

Thats cool. I was always interested in the history and the little stories from behind the scenes. It brings things to life.

[DarthNuno]

I've just found back this pictures 



Maybe it's one of the Victors original pictures (because of all these 'sparkles') ?

Who is Eric W. Schwartz ? A member of the original team or just a fan who used Deluxe Paint to improve the original picture ?

[ANY]

Who is Eric W. Schwartz ? A member of the original team or just a fan who used Deluxe Paint to improve the original picture ?

WHO is Eric Schwartz
Bruno I bet you don't have an Amiga back in the days... 
Search "Eric Schwartz Sabrina" on Google
hehe He also design the logo for a bowling near me, not to say the owner is an Amiga fan

See ya

[Dexter]

Couldn't help it 

[funkycochise]

Very cool to hear testimony of creators of those blessed times.
I'm still can believe it's true.
See Bruno, be proud of your site.

To Bruno, you don't know Eric Swartz ? Shame on you hihihi...
At that time it was one of the most famous graphic animator on the amiga scene.
I'm sure you already have seen one of his work.