Killer Feature
66 / wfmag.ccDragon BreedHere be dragons – and a neat mechanic
that surely deserves further developmenthe rapid and noisy proliferation of shoot-’em-
ups in late-eighties arcades left developers
with a major problem to solve: how could they
make their game stand out from the crowd?
Japanese firm Irem, who’d helped trigger the
whole shooter arms race with 1987’s R-Type, came up with
a better gimmick than most in Dragon Breed. You controlled
a crossbow-wielding warrior – named Kayus – who rode
around on the back of a limbless, fire-breathing serpent.
(Thinking about it, this could make Dragon
Breed the first-ever game to be influenced
by the 1984 children’s fantasy flick, The
NeverEnding Story, where its young hero
soared around on the back of Falkor,
the benign luckdragon.) While Kayus was
vulnerable to attack, bullets and enemies positively rolled
off the dragon, so you could use the beast’s segmented tail
as both a shield and a weapon – an idea other shooters had
toyed with in varying ways, from the markedly similar Saint
Dragon, developed by Jaleco, to Irem’s own X-Multiply, with its
ship protected by indestructible, whip-like tendrils.
Dragon Breed’s real innovation, though, was the player’s
ability to park the dragon up and have Kayus jump off its back
and walk around on foot, making the game something of a
shooter-platformer hybrid. Admittedly, Sunsoft introduced a
not dissimilar idea in its action title Blaster Master a year earlier
on the NES, but that game’s mix of on-foot sequences and tank
driving felt closer in style to one another – and more clearly
delineated – than in Dragon Breed, where the act of controlling
Kayus on the ground was markedly different from the freedom
of zooming around on the screen on the back of the serpent.
The curious thing about Dragon Breed was that it barely
explored the unique possibilities of its own concept; there were
early moments that required you to disembark and snag handy
power-ups on low platforms, then hop back on to continue
your journey, but these were comparatively rare. Indeed,
take a look at some ‘let’s play’ videos on
YouTube, and you’ll find expert players who
can complete Dragon Breed without ever
letting Kayus step off the dragon at all. It’s
as though Irem started off down one design
path, started to get cold feet, and retreated
to the safer confines of a more typical arcade shooter.
This is an unusual Killer Feature, then: a kind of what might
have been. The Dragon Breed we got was a rock-solid, playable
shooter, but it could have been even more than this – a
true hybrid that mixed the requisite monster slaughter with
areas that only Kayus could clear on foot, or sequences that
encouraged the player to repeatedly switch between human
and dragon.
If any developers reading this, we’re basically saying we’re
keen to play a shooter-platformer mash-up that takes the idea
Irem dropped in 1989, and explore it to its fullest potential.
Our thumbs are primed and ready.T
“It barely explored the
unique possibilities of
its own concept”IREM / 1989 / ARCADEDragon Breed