A knight to remember; Dirk the Daring and other Dragon's Lair characters return with a new look in an expanded story. (Gaming).

Game graphics have never looked so good, thanks to the new generation of graphics cards and processors, including those in the latest consoles. While most developers are using these advancements to increase the level of realism in their games, Dragon-stone Software and Dragons Lair LLC are using leading-edge graphics technology primarily to advance the storytelling aspect of Dragon's Lair 3D: Return to the Lair, a 3D game that maintains its original cartoon-shaded look.

Dragon's Lair 3D resurrects the popular characters and creatures featured in the original 2D Dragon's Lair titles, as the bumbling but valiant knight Dirk the Daring again tries to rescue Princess Daphne from an evil wizard and menacing dragon. "The tremendous power of the new consoles and PCs enabled development options and sparked ideas we could only have dreamed of when we created the first Dragon's Lair game 20 years ago," says producer Don Bluth, perhaps best known for his work in a number of animated feature films, including The Land Before Anastasia, and Titan A.E.

"The heart of Dragon's Lair always has been its compelling story. With Dragon's Lair 3D, we basically created an interactive animated movie," Bluth continues. "The game has all the plot twists and turns of a feature film. But, in this case, players are in control."

According to Thomas Konkol, director/art director, the new release--for the PC, PlayStation 2, Xbox, and GameCube--is a "retelling" of the original tale. "This time, though, the game provides more back-story to the histories of the creatures that live in the castle and why Dirk is chosen to be the princess's savior," he adds.

Since its introduction in 1983 as the first full-animation laser disc arcade game, Dragon's Lair has been raising the bar in gaming graphics with more than two dozen versions of the title, albeit all of them, until now, created in 2D. "With Dragon's Lair 3D, we needed to push the envelope for next-level gaming, yet we wanted to create something that the fans of the previous titles would enjoy," says Bluth. "As such, we worked hard to keep the look close to the original game, going so far as to use original hand-painted backgrounds that were texture-mapped onto the 3D environment."

Game Characteristics

The artists built the Dragon's Lair 3D character models with Discreet 3ds max and created the textures in Adobe Systems' Photoshop. They animated the characters using the bone feature in max and the biped feature in Discreet's Character Studio. When more control was needed than the Character Studio biped alone could provide, such as for animating the hair and cloth, the team linked the 3ds max bones to the biped structure. When a squash-and-stretch animation was heeded, the group used just the max bone structure.