The Blu-ray release has been directly transferred, and remastered, from the original film to 1080p and 5.1 surround sound. Extras on the disc, also in 1080p, include an interview with the original Dragon's Lair creators Don Bluth, Gary Goldman and Rick Dyer. Another cool feature of the Blu-Ray is the side by side comparison between the Amiga, Deluxe Pack PC, 20th Anniversary, Laserdisc, DVD and Blu-ray releases of Dragon's Lair. With the Blu-Ray release, fans of Dragon's Lair will finally get the "ultimate" release available of the title.

I had a chance to chat with David Foster, Executive Producer of the Dragon's Lair Blu-Ray release, on what some of the challenges were in being the first BD-J game title out on the high definition medium. David shares what it was like programming in Java for Blu-Ray (BD-J), how long the production and transfer took, why they went with the Blu-Ray format for Dragon Lair's debut in HD (and are just about ready for HD-DVD) and what else is to come from Digital Leisure.

Jump to the interview below!

Dragon's Lair Blu-Ray is available for pre-order here from Digital Leisure.

Tell me about your involvement with the Dragon's Lair Blu-Ray release.

DF: I'm the guy who actually did the Blu-Ray coding and was involved fairly heavily with some of the other aspects that went into the game. We had a pile of folks doing single frame cleanup on it. That took a lot of time and effort. We removed all kinds of dust, hairs and film noise. It's interesting, you could actually compare our PC HD version with the original capture we did to the Blu-ray release to see the difference. We show it on the disc.

How long did it take to go frame by frame and about how many people were involved?

DF: Maybe five people. We started that in about June 2006 and finished toward the end of the year. A bit more than half a year.

Who do you think this release would appeal to most?

DF: We have a pretty loyal following of Dragon's Lair fans. These are typically people who were playing Dragon's Lair when it came out in 1983. So I would say in 1983 if someone was between the age of 6 and 25, they had pretty heavy exposure to Dragon's Lair. It made such an impact at the time that it has really stuck with people through the last 20-odd years. So our demographics now is kind of 30 to 50. People that have grown up with Dragon's Lair. These are the people that can now afford to put HD TVs in their living room and actually want to share it with their kids. With the Blu-ray release we really reached the ultimate in terms of the quality of Dragon's Lair. It's a perfect fit.

I remember back in the day at Castle Park, seeing it, but I couldn't afford to play it as much or with the liberty that you can by having it on a Blu-Ray. It was, what, 50 cents for a few lives?

DF: Yeah, 50 cents. It was the first 50 cent arcade machine. Everything was 25 cents when it came out at 50 cents. The lines were huge at the machine.

Yeah, the arcade cabinets of Dragon's Lair seemed to break down quite a bit.

DF: Yeah, that's one of the reasons why the laser disc technology didn't last in the arcades. It was a little too fragile. Sometimes the laser disc would get scratched and the laser disc hardware itself would wear out. It was actually not commercial grade hardware. It was home units. Some had 75,000 plays on them and were at the end of their lives. That started happening about 6 months to a year of Dragon's Lair being in the arcade. The beauty of blu-ray is that it is a lot more durable.

What were some of the biggest challenges in bringing it to the Blu-ray format?

DF: The biggest really was Blu-ray Java. We really were pioneers in terms of getting something to work. The documentation and the availability of hardware to test on was really a nightmare, quite honestly. It took us nearly eight solid months to do something, that if we had the right documentation, could be done in probably a month. So just at every turn when there would be something that would go wrong, there would be sort of a different implementation across the few different players we had to test on. Functions would be implemented differently, so we had to find some sort of common way to handle all these different machines. The good news is the Playstation 3, which honestly we could not test on, we crossed our fingers and checked discs, the PS3 turned out to be a great implementation of BD-J. It really plays the best than on any other system. So, sigh of relief!

Yeah a big one, I imagine!

DF: Yeah, it's not cheap to run these masters. Everything is expensive with blu-ray. If something had gone wrong on the blu-ray in a big way, we would just have no way to try and even figure out what to change to try and make it work. Let alone the $3000+ you need to pay every time to make a master. So, big sigh of relief when it worked and it worked fantastically.

So how many Blu-ray players did you test on?

DF: We have 3 players. The challenge of the players is that they don't allow us to put in anything but a final production ready disc. So, these test discs that we cut, there's only really two players, plus a PC player, that we're able to actually test on. So we had to extrapolate all the little problems we had on those and try to make generalized solutions that would work for the rest of the BD-J implementations.

Was it a lack of the technical support on the programming of the Java on the Blu-Ray that made it difficult?

DF: Yeah, unless you are in the inner circle. We were really early on with development tools that we purchased. We just aren't in the inner circle that someone at Sony or one of the big companies could probably just get information. We really had to put the pieces of the puzzle together.

Why did you guys go with Blu-Ray instead of HD-DVD?

DF: We still do have intentions of coming out with HD-DVD. There are just challenges in terms of the hardware that is out there right now, in terms of compatibility. Similar issues to the BD-J issues, but a little bit more severe. So we're sort of waiting that one out until there is a little bit more maturity. There's a couple of movies out there that aren't running particularly well on HD-DVD. Children of Men is one. The issues are the firmware implementations and the other is the development and technology. I think honestly on the HD side there's a lot more openness and availability of development documentation. I think it falls down a little bit on the firmware implementation. I think all of this would get addressed in the short term. We just have to wait it out a little bit. We don't want to be making the same headlines that Children of Men has. The HD DVD version of Dragon's Lair is about of 99% done.

One thing I notice between the Blu-ray movies and the HD DVD movies is that on the HD-DVD there are more interactive menus.

DF: Yeah, to do all the fun stuff on Blu-Ray you need to use the BD-J and the implementation is a little bit more variable. Admittedly, there's more blu-ray players in the marketplace, so there's a lot of different companies that are just getting up to speed on the BD-J implementations. They don't have a lot of reference material to test against. We've actually supplied our Dragon's Lair Blu-Ray disc to some of the major hardware companies to test so they can improve their firmware for future revisions.

Did you visit the Dragon's Lair archives at the Savannah College of Art and Design? Is that where all the archives are?

DF: That's where all the physical cells are. I've never visited. We actually went back to the film that was sitting in the vault at Technicolor. That's where we went back to get all of our material. They store film for an enormous number of companies in climate controlled facilities so the film lasts over time. That's where the film has been sitting for the last twenty-odd years. We had them do the capture in terms of film to HD video. From there we went and did our implementation. We received the HD cam color correct transfer. We then brought that into the computers and did frame by frame touch up using off the shelf tools and put in the time and effort to get it done.

What is about the total playing time in Dragon's Lair?

DF: Well, it could be as little as half an hour and as much as many days. Depending on whether you want to see all the deaths or not!

What is the capacity that Dragon's Lair takes on the Blu-Ray disc?

DF: We take a fraction of the space, about 15-20 gigs.

Do you have an estimated release date for Dragon's Lair II and Space Ace on Blu-ray?

DF: We finished the Space Ace video cleaning. We are moving on to Dragon's Lair II. Everything is in the works. We're hoping with Space Ace we can hopefully take advantage of a couple of the new features that are coming out with the new version 2 spec of BD-J, which is scheduled for this fall. We're not going to rush it. We're going to see what we can do with Sony's new technology implementations that are going to be coming out.

Anything else you would like to tell us about the Dragon's Lair Blu-Ray release?

DF: I think fans are going to get a kick out of the commentary. We learned stuff in there. We've been doing this for twenty years, but there's stuff that came out in those interviews and commentary that was news to us. I think people will get a kick out of that. The other extra I love is the side by side comparison with the old Amiga version. I remember when the Amiga version came out and everyone was just like "wow, look at that quality, the graphics on the Amiga is amazing!" You put it side by side with the HD version and it's like "we tolerated that video quality?"

Did you guys do the Amiga release?

DF: We didn't, but in my former life we did. I was with ReadySoft when we released that back in 1988.

Cool, thanks for taking the time to share your experience with us! Thanks to David Foster and Paul Gold of Digital Leisure for making this interview and insight to the production of Dragon's Lair Blu-Ray happen!

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