I saw Dragon's Lair running for the first time on Amiga when I was something like 9 years old. This was a complete shock because it featured full motion animation and it was running from floppy disks! This feat was achieved by using polygons instead of bitmaps, to save memory space. This gave the idea a few years later to Eric Chahi to use polygons instead of bitmaps for his new me Another World which would become an immediate hit as well... leading to the game Flashback (from a different creator) reusing the same technique, and the adventure game Cruise for a Corpse as well, making the game company Delphine Software very rich in the process.
There are tons of fun stories when one starts talking about Dragon's Lair.
I'm pretty sure Dragon's Lair used bitmaps even for the Amiga version. However, you deserve an upvote just for mentioning the awesome Eric Chahi, whose wonderful game Another World (aka Out of this World) indeed used polygons. Still one of my favorites games ever.
Turns out you were right, it used compressed bitmaps. But the inspiration piece for Eric Chahi was correct:
> ERIC CHAHI: The polygon idea came from playing the Dragon's Lair port for the Amiga, which was showing incredible big animation on the screen, thanks to Randy Linden. That game's graphics weren't polygons, but were compressed bitmaps directly read from the disk. This was revolutionary for the time.
> I thought it could be done with polygons since the animation was flat. I wrote a vectorial code and programmed some speed tests. The idea was to use polygons not only for movie like animation but also for gameplay sequences. Think of the sprites as an assemblage of vector shapes. This proved to be a major advantage because you had big sprites that were scalable which took up less disk space than traditional sprites.
I know your post was tongue-in-cheek, but it's not quite that simple, I think. For one thing the design aesthetic is almost completely different -- if look at the (awesome!) Another World[1] there is very little in the form of shading and such. It's much more like an old-school cartoon than an actual realistic rendering -- which is what most 3D games (and cartoons!) tend to strive towards these days.
EDIT: Btw, IIRC this is the only game that I ever played where I didn't actually realize when it had started. The intro -> gameplay transition is so seamless that I didn't even notice it. Pure genius.
Exactly. I mean an engine that's optimized to render vector polygons with 2D animation. Maybe OpenGL is all you'd need, but it seems like there could be libraries that let you focus on the animation rather than the low level details.
Really? I had it for Amiga too and I can't remember it looking polygon-like. I recall there were multiple disks and the frame rate was very low. The resolution was only 368x567i.
There are tons of fun stories when one starts talking about Dragon's Lair.