Back when
Dragon's Lair first came out, I was an
arcade junkie. This
laserdisk-based game was new and exciting, and I picked up $20 in quarters to play.
During the sessions, you move Dirk the Daring using an 8-way joystick. Sometimes you would get a clue as to what you were supposed to do, normally shown as some area or object flashing quickly. Some rooms, like the octopus breaking through the roof, were a fast series of stick moves that you had to perform with precision timing.
As Zero Signal noted, there really was no game play. It was twitching on cue, and after I spent $15 of the twenty, I had progressed all the way through the final climactic scene and rescued Daphne from the dragon. I spent the rest of the quarters polishing up the timing.
The good thing about the game was that you could easily gather a large crowd. I ended up being so good at it that I watched for the scene, then looked away and had a conversation with the cutest girl while basically playing blind. For that $20 investment, I picked up four dates from the timing skills I developed.
At that point, it was just boring. The novelty of the cartoon had wore off, and sometimes I killed Dirk just to watch the sequences. When the successors to Dragon's Lair came out (most notably Space Ace), I didn't bother playing. It was old news by then.