io9
If you played arcade games in the 1980s, then you probably remember the quarter-sucking craze of laserdisc games which were led by the juggernaut of Dragon's Lair. Enough small fortunes were lost to that game to start a small media empire, which is just what creator Don Bluth tried to do. He followed that swords and sorcery game up with Space Ace, which had the evil Borf trying to take over the Earth with his dreaded Infanto Ray that could turn adults into mewling kids. And now we've got the whole secret history of Space Ace for your reading pleasure.
Here's how the game went: You spent your hard-earned allowance on the game controlling Dexter, the teenager that Ace reverts into, and tried to rescue your bitchy girlfriend Kimberly. Who just happened to look an awful lot like the buxom Daphne from Dragon's Lair. Now for the back story.
- Besides creating Dragon's Lair and Space Ace, Don Bluth was a chief animator at Disney, and also directed The Secret of NIMH, An American Tail, The Land Before Time, All Dogs Go To Heaven, and Titan A.E., among others.
- Space Ace appeared only four months after Dragon's Lair, and was offered in a standalone cabinet, or as a conversion kit. You just popped out the Dragon's Lair disc, popped in Space Ace, changed a few stickers and the control panel and bingo.
- Space Ace was promoted as if it were a movie, with movie-style promo posters and press kits. Bluth even did interviews with film journalists to promote the game.
- Just like they did with Dragon's Lair, to save money Bluth's studio didn't hire actors for the voices of the characters, but used employees to provide them. Bluth himself is the voice of the evil Borf.
- The animators made actual physical models of Ace's ship, the Star Pac, his motorcycle and the tunnel seen in the dogfight for the game. These were filmed and then rotoscoped to provide a more realistic look.
- The original concept for the game was based on the Billy Batson / Captain Marvel comic book model. Dexter would be able to turn into super space hero Ace at different times in the game. However, since they were marketing the game to teenagers, they thought they would relate to an adult better. So that model was reversed.
- Unlike Dragon's Lair, you could choose your difficulty setting when you popped your quarters in: Cadet, Captain, or Ace. At the Cadet level you'd only see roughly 50% of the game, and you'd need to choose the Ace setting to see it all.
- The game also offered multiple paths for the player to choose from, rather than having to follow one course of action in each scene. At different points in the game the player had the opportunity to slap the "Energize!" button to turn Dexter back into Ace, which would result in the scene being played differently. You could complete the scene as either character.
- At one point in the game a decoy Kimberly turns into Hexter, an evil version of Dexter, and you have to do battle. He then turns into a mega-giant evil Ace, and you have to shoot him in the mouth. Ouch.
- Although Borf wanted to take over the Earth with his weird de-aging ray (and who wouldn't mind being a teenager again?) he sure spent a lot of his time trying to kill Ace/Dexter with laser beams, giant drilling robots, and massive traps.
- In 1984 twelve Space Ace episodes were produced for the "Saturday Supercade" of shows on CBS that featured other video game cartoons like Pac-Man and Frogger. Nancy Cartwright, the later voice of Bart, provided the voice of Kimberly.
- The game didn't anywhere near the popularity that Dragon's Lair did, and it's high cost sent the laserdisc game fad into a tailspin that it didn't recover from. In 1991 Space Ace II: Borf's Revenge was released for the Amiga and PC platforms, but quickly faded into obscurity.
- Although it's been on DVD before, in April a high-definition version of Space Ace will be out for HD-DVD and Blu-ray players. You play the game with your remote, which sort of sucks. However, there's a ton of extra material on the disc, including the ability to just watch the game all the way through. It's one way to relive the time you spent in the 80s, without rolls of quarters in your pocket.
Comments
Oh how I miss the 80s arcade experience...
I was always amazed at watching people who were good at this and Dragon's Lair at the arcade. For all you young people, an arcade was a place where people used to go in the 80's to play video games. You could also get some pretty good nachos there too.
Yeah I guess Dragons Lair is out on Blu-Ray, which I have in my queue on netflix because that was the scourge of my youth. Over and over and over again did I try to play that and I could never get past the first little thing. But dammit I am going to do it now.
I managed to find both Dragon's Lair (I & II) and Space Ace this summer at the video arcade of Wall Drug in -wait for it- Wall, South Dakota (about 20 minutes from the Badlands). I was on a cross-country road trip and spent about an hour and a half playing the games. It was a lot of fun, but I walked away about $20 poorer. I really wish they'd release those on XBL or something.
@griff311: @rainmkr: I miss it too, however in my area they were also intimidating as f**k. plenty of soft core drug-dealers abusing the darkened nature of the arcade as well as bigger jerkier kids. That being said, they were a real experience that is lost on today's kids with their consoles and net-play. Being a 12 year old sniper with a potty mouth in COD4 is one thing, but its another thing entirely when the people you are challenging and talking smack to are right next to you and may beat the crap out of you if they felt offended. Here is a link from io9's sister site of what I hope to be my next vacation. [gizmodo.com]
I have to admit that I hate this type of gameplay.
@vansau: Where the heck is Wall Drug?
I used to try and play dragon's Lair everytime I went to the arcade but could never figure out how to do anything in that game. I think I concluded the machine was broken and eventually gave up.
The Art College where I work as a librarian spent a small fortune acquiring the Don Bluth Archive. I've had the pleasure to see some of the original concept art for this and other Bluth features, including one or two that were never made. The best part was getting to handle original cells from NIMH. Sometime, I really love my job.
We had both of these at a pizza place called "Crystals" that was grown-up enough not to be Showbiz Pizza or Chuck E Cheese, but not so grown up as to have the scary bigger kids.
So many great Saturdays there. Although I also hated this type of game play. Mostly because I royally sucked at it and would retreat to Elevator Action.
Wow, Wall Drug's still around... last time I was there, it was 1971.
-Kle.
My parents, being insane gaming nuts back in the day, actually purchased the Space Ace machine and with the exception of an often sticky joystick works to this day. I loved it as a kid and was always inspired by the art direction. I would play it over and over just to see key scenes...the chase scene on the metal planet on the harder difficulties is still one of my favorite space battle scenes of all time.
The game play is basic, of course, but now that I really think about it the cartoon is brilliant in its presentation. It rarely slows down and constantly keeps things interesting by using twisted and tilted camera angles. The final battle with Borf is also brilliant.
The evil version of Dexter, by the way, is even more twisted than the article mentions. Not only will he split into several clones of himself but he will begin to blow off chunks of his body until he's just this rolling, laughing head hell-bent on crushing you.
Somehow I turned out okay, aside from going to art college, I guess. ;)
Yeah, this game was definitely a quarter munching whore machine, without a doubt. It was still fun.
Man, I really miss arcades. A couple weeks ago I walked into the one I use to go to as a kid, and was really saddened by what it had become.
I used to always play Dragon's Lair at the arcade, but I was always terrible at it. I don't think I ever made it more than a couple screens in.
For the record, I've never beaten the blasted thing on Space Ace difficulty. That roller skate maze is ridiculous (but very pretty).
I also really sucked at Dragon's Lair. :P Dragon's Lair 2, on the other hand...
Did anyone else ever notice the little nod to a major company on the wing of the "Star Pac." The star pac is labelled as "R632." Now, as I'm sure many of you know, on space ace and dragons layer, the scenes would sometimes be played with a horizontal flip, so the commands were backwards. Doesn't "R632" backwards look remarkably like "SEGA?"
AW MAN. I would love to get my hands on one of those movie posters!
Man loved arcades. Would go all the time with my dad to the Dixie Drive-in when we'd visit the inlaws:P I remember watchin this guy go for the record on Defender at an arcade called The Fort. He was amazing so many ships he could walk away and go to the bathroom with no worries. The place was packed and there was an official observer and everything. Ahhh the days!! I can still here it... Chicken come back and fight like a robot!! You can't stop the Wizard of Wor! Ot! Ot! Ot!
I remeber enough to know Kimberly (above) was a demanding Redhead and Daphne ([www.armchairempire.com]) was a helpless Blonde.
OH! And Dragon's Lair also had a sequel.
i loved space ace, i was the first to finish it in our town arcade. the arcade operator stood there watching and said that he had never seen anyone finish it, handed me a hand full of tokens and walked off.
little did he know it took me more than a handfull of tokens to learn the game and finish it over the month or so i played it.
it sucks being old.
Please give credit where credit is due. Drangon's Lair and Space Ace were created, designed, and developed by Rick Dyer and his company Advanced Microcomputer Systems. Don Bluth was the lead animator working from AMS' designs and storyboards. Bluth's work is substantial but he was not the creator of these games or their sequels by any stretch of the imagination.
@ everyone who's interested:
[en.wikipedia.org]
Wall Drug was one of the weirdest (yet very entertaining) places I've ever visited.
... I could never get Dragon's Lair to "work"; which is to say, I could never figure how to play it past the first screen, and it cost too much to experiment. And I never saw anybody that could play it.
But I was a big fan of Secret of NIMH. Even read the book. And the sequel. This is how cool I am. I empathize with rats and mice and crows and... so forth.
@hageesheart: I couldn't get past the first screen, either -- it seemed impossibly difficult for a 50-cent game. Of course, I couldn't get past the first level of Donkey Kong Jr. until a year or two ago, either, so the problem may not have been Dragon's Lair.
In the interest of oversharing, I would also like to add that I watched the Space Ace cartoon religiously as a tot (and I really think there was a Dragon's Lair cartoon, too, but a quick Google search seems to prove me wrong), and that it wasn't until seeing an episode a week or two ago on Boomerang that I realized the, um, childification of Kimberly via Borf's gun loomed large in some very early, um, sexytime thoughts buried deep in my psyche.
@moff: Ah, my Google search was just too quick. This page and others confirm that I'm not crazy -- there was a DL cartoon. Um, the reason I remembered that was because there was an evil witch in at least one episode who had a pair a gryphons named Merv and Andy; my mom thought that was hilarious.
(Also, check that link out -- what a fucking great lineup that was in 1984: Superfriends, Muppet Babies, Turbo Teen, Dungeons & Dragons, Pole Position, Saturday Supercade, Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends/The Incredible Hulk, and Mr. T. I would get up to watch all of those now, as a 31-year-old.)
@92BuickLeSabre: Are you from Texas? I used to go to Crystals all the freakin' time.
@moff: I think, in a very profound way, the Muppet Babies have ruined me for life. Which is to say: they didn't ruin my life. They just made life seem shitty. In comparison to being a muppet baby, I mean. But, really: none of us can ever be a baby of muppets.
I beat Dragon's Lair and Space Ace (the latter on easy). Alot of quarters were spent.
I set up shop in a Brandsmart on one of their demo Phillips CD-i consoles till I beat Space Ace.
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