Dragon Lair's Interview

[Josh]

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

David Foster: 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.

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?"

http://www.gamingbits.com/content/view/1915/2/