Unused content

DL Beta Startup — Dirk in front of an unused background in *Dragon's Lair*

Unused content is a group of components in video games that were not used or changed during development. Information about unused content can come from many different sources such as developers revealing some of the game's information while in development, promotional material that could use an earlier build of the game or unused files found in the final game.

The original laserdisc games Dragon's Lair and Dragon's Lair II: Time Warp have had many elements removed before their releases.

Dragon's Lair[]

The original Dragon's Lair has a large amount of unused content that was mostly cut from the game due to time and/or memory constraints. The game as originally created seems to be much slower-paced than the final release as the levels, quick time events and even Death Scenes were longer and more detailed.

Introduction sequence[]

The original intro sequence did not feature the subtitles that identify the names of the characters.

Scenes and death nodes[]

There was a version of the reviving scene with a background of multiple different-colored Dirks running instead of hovering skeletons. The reviving and game over scenes were longer and contained music that is not in the final version.

The yellow room's floor did not crumble and led to several different scenes: A scene where Dirk slowly walks up to a door smacking his face against it, which causes the pile of bricks to fall; another where he runs to the left instead of the right; and a scene where he moves a log that leads to a secret door, which he enters.
The tentacle room had one scene in which Dirk walked up the stairs without the left side being filled with tentacles, and another had Dirk jumping to a shelf of weapons attempting to retrieve one but he would end up breaking one and retreating back to the middle of the room.
In the pool room, The floor did not crumble away as Dirk moved forward. Dirk looked up at a pile of rocks that about to fall on him and he could run left or right. Scenes such as Dirk approaching a wall of knives as well as the crumbling floor lasted longer likely to give the player more time to react. When Dirk approached the pool, a fire would erupt behind him, prompting him to jump into the water, being greeted by snakes who were not inside of walls and were coiled together. When Dirk was about to be crushed, the spiders of the room were present.
The flattening stair scene had Dirk walking down the first flight of stairs without them slanting and making him slip. The pit's tentacle monsters did not appear, and the scene of the second flight of stairs flattening was longer.
In the snake pit, only one snake appeared.
The Giddy Goons level had a trap: if Dirk immediately walked right, he would trigger it and a death scene would play where he is brutally impaled up against a wall, choking. The scene where Dirk slices a Giddy Goon in half is a scene where a button must be pressed and is not present in a death scene.
The room known as the "Fire Room" did not have fire and instead used the green tentacles from a previous scene. Dirk could escape through the door with no harm or move the bench that leads to another room.
The wizard's chamber did not have the bubbly green monster present, and had Dirk walk to and interact with the three potions located in the left side of the room. One potion enhanced Dirk's sword and another he simply drank from. Dirk could also climb down a ladder to another room.
The Crypt scene did not have Daphne, the Chattering Skulls, large skeleton hands or the black swarm present. There were also only two skeletal ghosts instead of three.
The catwalk scene had an extended scene of Dirk climbing a loose rope upward to the door, and it had another of Dirk entering a magical door after fending off bats.
The caves room did not have a veil of electricity chasing after Dirk and forcing him into one room. If he went right, Dirk would be in a room of three moving rocks and dark tentacles that he would have to hop over in order to advance. The lava room and the crushing door were their own separate rooms that Dirk could choose to go.
- In 2024, Cardsmiths released Series One of its Dragon's Lair trading card series, which features the caves room as card #5 ("A SHOCKING DEVELOPMENT") with a description that offers an explanation for the room only having one viable exit: "Dirk thinks he'll need to choose between the three caves to continue, but the castle has other plans. An electrical net will make sure that Dirk chooses the one that Mordroc has selected."^[1]

Gargoyles[]

The Gargoyles scene was an intended scene that did not make it past the line drawings stage. It would have had Dirk encounter four Gargoyles armed with spears. One Gargoyle throws a spear at Dirk, but he destroys it with his sword. Three more Gargoyles then throw all their spears at Dirk. As several small volcanoes begin to erupt, Dirk hops onto some stepping stones in a river leading to the land that the Gargoyles are on. Dirk fends off the Gargoyles as he makes his way across. He reaches their side and finds a treasure chest on the top of a hill; the chest has a staircase inside it leading to Singe's lair. Dirk enters just before some spears impale him. In 2002, this scene was painted and made playable in the anniversary box set of Dragon's Lair.

Space Ace[]

Line art and painted cels exist of a more juvenile variation of Kimberly, suggesting she might have experienced the effects of Commander Borf’s Infanto Ray at some point in the game, similar to Ace’s transformations into his “Dexter” alter ego. The animation frames appear to match up with a finished sequence of Kimberly hopping across platforms shown during the game’s attract mode, immediately prior to Dexter teleporting her into his spaceship while trying to evade Borf’s ray blasts.^[2]

Dragon's Lair II: Time Warp[]

Dragon's Lair II only has one missing scene, as opposed to all of the content unused by its predecessor. The scene was of Dirk and Mordroc battling aboard the Time Machine until the wizard gets the upper hand on Dirk as he crashes onto a pirate ship. A group of small pirates confiscate Dirk's sword as the inside of the ship begins to flood, and Dirk climbs up to the surface. He finds a dagger before being washed back to the side of the ship alongside the captain and a sailor who happened to have Dirk's sword on his back. Dirk tries to get the sword back but is roped up and once again pushed back by water, and the scene's climax is unknown. Artwork of Death Scenes planned for the stage also exist, including nodes of Dirk getting his finger bitten by a sailor, running into the mouth of a large fish named Jaws, and two nodes of him being eaten by a kraken. The storyboard of the scene was featured in the Dragon's Lair Trilogy, and a similar scene is found in Dragon's Lair III: The Curse of Mordread. The stage's song was to be called “I Am a Pirate”, inspired by Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Pirates of Penzance with lyrics apparently recorded by voice actor Hal Smith. After the studio’s relocation to Ireland, the ship model—previously stored in Bluth’s garage—went missing and made finishing that sequence impractical.^[3]

Preliminary concepts for the game's storyline included various levels, enemies, and scenarios not seen in the final release. An early idea for the game was that Dirk and the Time Machine would track Mordroc through the halls of time by prioritizing the most infamous events of recorded history, and Dirk would confront the wizard's evil allies during those epochs, including Blackbeard the Pirate, King Henry the Eighth, and Black Bart of the American Wild West.^[4]

The original arcade game was produced with two alternative animation sequences that would play out in Stage 7 before merging near the end of game (depending on whether players collected all Treasures), but the Leland company removed the shorter “completionist” from the final laserdisc, forcing players to collect all Treasures in order to complete the game and making the longer sequence featuring Daphne’s transformation into The Banshee as the game’s only climax. The alternative sequence was later restored into subsequent re-releases of the game in as a feature of a "Director's Cut" mode. Prior to the high-definition remastered editions of the game, the fully-animated shorter ending was considered unused content due to being unplayable through officially available releases.

Several animated Death Scenes were also left out of the original arcade release but later restored in subsequent home releases of the game.^[5] Other planned death nodes may have been cut from production prior to full animation, such as one from the Garden of Eden stage where Eve lands upon Dirk and crushes him while lunging for the apple.^[6]

Space Ace (NES)[]

A side-scrolling platforming game based on Space Ace was reported to have been in development for the Nintendo Entertainment System but the only known evidence exists in the form of prototype screencaps from a magazine.^[7]^[8] MovieTime developed the Dragon's Lair (NES) game which released in late 1990 in North America, but continued development for later releases for the Japanese and PAL versions.

Dragon's Lair IV[]

The 1993 ReadySoft catalog teased a home computer release of “Dragon’s Lair IV” in the fall of 1993, intended as a direct sequel to Dragon's Lair III: The Curse of Mordread. Bluth’s studio created storyboards for an original opening sequence that featured the apparent return of Mordroc to trouble Dirk and Daphne in their family's cottage. According to surviving storyboards, Daphne might have taken a more active role in the game, possibly even riding a horse and fighting off enemies with a sword at some point in the storyline. As the storyboards progressed, however, Daphne would once again fall under a spell of a magical ring and is enchanted by a sleeping spell by Mordroc or another similar-looking dark wizard. Dirk and the children chase the wizard out of their cottage and Dirk boards the Time Machine to embark on a new adventure to revive Daphne from the wizard's spell.^[9]

Readysoft president David Foster later recalled: "Dragon's Lair IV never came to be. We were going to do it but ultimately felt that the spinoffs were getting a bit tired and we never went through with it. By this time, CD-ROM was becoming popular and so we moved our efforts into producing a full version of the game on CD.”^[10]