Sega's Astron Belt was unveiled at an arcade industry trade show in 1982, making it one of the earliest examples of an arcade game with a LaserDisc player included as part of its hardware. Dragon's Lair would go on to be the first widely popular and successful LaserDisc game in arcades, ushering in a brief era of Quick-Time Event-driven arcade games built on expensive, fault-prone hardware.
Other games, like Astron Belt and Atari's movie tie-in, Firefox, would attempt to draw standard video game graphics on top of a video background, making for games that would behave more like traditional video games of the era, but with a little something extra behind the action.
The technology would continue on in arcades and at home via Pioneer's fairly obscure LaserActive console, but eventually the rise of better video compression techniques and cheaper optical disc technology meant that the big LaserDisc players in arcades would eventually be replaced by CD-ROM drives on home consoles. Some LD games would make their way to the CD-ROM format.
Many LaserDisc-based arcade games are emulated by an open-source package named DAPHNE, which can be used with either recordings of the original video discs or by controlling an actual LaserDisc player itself.
Log in to comment