Atari’s collapse cost us this exquisite-looking Laserdisc game

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  Here’s where players started. [credit: Richard Taylor ]

When the early-’80s home video game business began dwindling in the US , Atari looked to a Laserdisc arcade cabinet to boost its fortunes. That’s according to Richard Taylor, who served as the film director for Atari Playland , an unreleased game cabinet from classic Atari’s waning days.

Laserdisc games were already a hot commodity by 1983, as seen in the Don Bluth-directed Dragon’s Lair, which used hand-drawn animation instead of an arcade’s usual pixelated sprites. But unlike the single-game Dragon’s Lair cabinet, “the idea [or Atari Playland ]was to make a freestanding arcade structure that, using Laserdisc, would have 10 games in it, ” Taylor told Ars in a recent interview. Also, unlike Dragon’s Lair , everything in Playland would be filmed with a real camera floating above elaborate miniatures on sizable sets.

Atari Playland featured multiple miniaturized sets; there had been plans for an intro inside a killer clown’s dressing room, a shot outside the park’s entrance, and a fully filmed ride-selection screen. The construction of those sets was “not cheap, ” according to Taylor, and required a lot of specifically filmed transitions.