You read that title right, this is the arcade Dragon’s Lair on your Super Nintendo. Not a facsimile, not a downgrade, well not too much, but the full arcade game. This is accomplished using special mod carts that allow fans to load their own games onto and play on the Super Nintendo. A very specific mod cart too, the SD2SNES.
Saving Your Quarters from Frustration
Dragon’s Lair in arcades was a quarter muncher from the get-go. In some of the more unscrupulous arcades this game could have been priced as high as $1 per play. Considering the game came out in the early to mid-1980s, that was a sizeable amount of money per play. Even the more standard 50 cents per play was quite a bit when compared to more conventional arcade games such as Pac-Man or Missile Command.
The draw was getting to literally play a cartoon. For many, this was enough to warrant parting with larger than normal amounts of money to play.
Even if you knew what to do and when, your chances of completing Dragon’s Lair on one set of quarters was not likely.
Bringing Dragon’s Lair Home
Over the years, we have seen ports of Dragon’s Lair for the Nintendo Entertainment System, Super Nintendo, Nintendo Game Boy all of which were nothing like the arcade game. These home ports were action platform adventures of varying degrees of frustration, but they were not animated affairs like the arcade game.
The Commodore Amiga and Game Boy Color both received reasonable recreations of the animated arcade game though. “truer” to the arcade ports hit the Sega CD, 3DO, Atari Jaguar CD, and Phillips CD-I (later DVD, and more recent console ports perfected it further).
You may be wondering, why is this SNES port so noteworthy then? In the grand scheme of things, it is not all that interesting. It requires specific hardware to make possible and graphically, there are TONS of artifacts.
It is interesting because it is running on Super Nintendo. For bragging rights as well – who would not want to whip this out for their next retro gaming get together?
Hack Games Longplay Channel on YouTube have a link to the download for those with the hardware to play on real SNES consoles.