I think I played Dragon's Lair just one time, and never played Space Ace; they were gorgeous to look at, let alone the fantastic audio, but I didn't find interesting games where one had essentially zero control on what the character was doing, and all it needed was pushing the right button at the right time. There were much more compelling games at the time, and I thanked both DL and SA for grabbing other players away from them at the arcade:^)

thread hijack: one game I liked a lot in the mid 80s but don't recall the name and failed to find later as retro emulated, assuming it does exist as such, is that one fantasy style platform in which a character fights in a dungeon against various creatures, one of which is a flying manta. Unfortunately I don't recall other details, but for some reasons I liked the flying manta a lot, probably because at the time I did some scuba diving with my father and always wanted to see one live, but that would have been impossible in our sea.

I was too young for DL but I absolutely remember its cousin, the hologram-driven Time Traveler [0]. It blew me away when I saw it in my local arcade, but I don't remember it being a good game at all. Most of my quarters at that time (1991-1992) were going to ST:TNG pinball, Outrunners/Virtua Racing, and STUN Runner.

Also worth a mention here is this kickass Italo remix of DL themes and samples [1] by Koto.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Traveler_(video_game) 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HRffez98uYY

For a hot minute, this amazing, lazerdisk, Fifty Cents a Play game off my youth, was $2 and a 2 Gb download for your PHONE.

(okay, it's still $4.99, but if anything demonstrates Moore's Law better, feel free to share it.)

Headline's wrong. It's 1/6 scale, not 1/16.

Absolutely hated that game, graphics couldn't make up for it. I still don't get why it has such a huge fan base.

Dragon's Lair: The fantasy adventure where you become a valiant knight, on a quest to rescue the fair princess from the clutches of an evil dragon. You control the actions of a daring adventurer, finding his way through the castle of a dark wizard, who has enchanted it with treacherous monsters and obstacles. In the mysterious caverns below the castle, your odyssey continues against the awesome forces that oppose your efforts to reach the Dragon's Lair. Lead on, adventurer. Your quest awaits!

This machine single-handedly destroyed my holiday allowance as a child.

They need a human to scale in the photos or something

The intro is burned into my brain, they always seemed to turn up the volume on Dragon’s Lair the loudest in the arcade.

This has released before, really janky little thing. It was worth playing in the 80s/90s, but just watch it on Youtube now...

How did this game work? It seems like it was a QTE game with no prompts. Why was it popular?

This and Space Ace were my favorites. The audio is forever etched into my brain.

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The amount of wasted quarters this make me remember...

DL and space ace could demolish a pocket full of coins

The cool kids pronounced it “Dragon Slayer”

Maybe there's some nostalgia value here, and although this game was innovative in that it used video disc to display unbelievable eye-popping graphics compared to video games of its era, as a video game it absolutely sucked, was not fun, play was too short, options astoundingly limited, and ultimately it was a ridiculous waste of quarters. But whatever makes people happy.