Dragon Lord / Dragons Breath

[1] Distributed in Australia by Mindscape. Distributed in France and translated to French by Silmarils. Distributed in Germany and translated to German by Ariolasoft.

[2] The little-known Turkish and Italian releases are extremely hard to find and receive a rarity rating of 4 stars.

Last known release: V1.0 (1990)


TRIVIA – In an overview of DRAGON LORD on his website, coder Andrew Bailey had these memories to share about the game in looking back on its development:

'The game almost didn't make it because of hardware (hard disk) failure. The game was developed on an Amiga 2000 with a PC-XT bridge board providing the hard disk support. One day, after much time had passed since a backup, the hard disk just failed and many hours of rebooting didn't bring it back up. So I went on a long walk and resigned myself to a long session re-coding. When I got home, I powered up the Amiga once more and the hard disk magically whirled into action. I quickly went and bought 50 floppy disks and backed up the hard disk. The hard disk didn't fail again, but I learnt my lesson and have been a backup fanatic ever since.

Because the game was developed on the Amiga, the artwork was developed with its capabilites in mind. This meant each screen could not use more than 32 colours, so the artist had to design a palette for each screen. However, the palette of 32 colours could be changed at any point on the screen, so the menu icons on the bottom had their own set of 32 colours. The arcade section could only use 16 colours as the shadow effect used a bitplane trick, with half the palette being a dimmed version of the other half.' [Source: Andrew Bailey(coder), via his website]