"Dirk the Daring" From Dragon's Lair

Released in 1983, Dragon's Lair was an Arcade phenomen, totally changing the world's understanding of what a videogame could be. Utilising Laserdisc storage technology to hold and access over 50,000 frames of former Disney animator, Don Bluth and his team's hand drawn animation, Dragon's Lair become the first of what might be called, an interactive movie.

In a world that was used to the basic sprites of Space Invaders, Pacman and Donkey Kong, this full screen cartoon was something completely different. I can remember the first time I saw it referenced in a Sunday Newspaper magazine supplement - I was hungry to see it in person and nagged my parents to take me to the nearest big arcade to see if it was there.

The only thing hungrier than me, was the machine's coin-slot. As any player will tell you, Dragon's Lair was a coin-guzzler of the worst kind!

I decided to try and build Dirk the Daring, hero of Dragon's Lair as I'd recently built a Lara Croft MOC, and while happy with her design, I couldn't ultimately submit her to IDEAS because it was a restricted IP. I still wanted to use some of the basic structure of that MOC, and Dirk sprang to mind as a good alternative.

He's very pose-able (in theory) although his feet might need to be attached to a baseplate of some kind, as his barrel chest and sword would make him quite top-heavy. I've used one printed piece for his mouth, and to be honest, I think he might need a different eye design on the 1x1 round tiles. He looks very spooked with those big round eyes right now. Give that this is very much designed as a display piece, I've created a castle like turret to act as a base for Dirk. Given the scale of the figure, I've used the bonnet piece to create a beveled brick like structure at a suitable scale.

There's a big crossover with video-gaming and Lego, and the older generation of Lego fans (mysefl included) were almost certainly gamers of one kind or another when we were kids. Many of us would've loved a Dirk the Daring action figure, as we'd have been able to create our own adventures rather than dropping another 50p (That's like £1.60 today for a game that could serioulsy last less than a minute!) into a 1983 arcade machine.

The recent PacMan set hopefully proves that the interest and demans for videogame related content is alive and well, and that the ongoing development of Lego Fortnite and Lego Horizon Adventures might convince the Lego IDEAS group that Dirk deserves from brick recognition, assuming he can survive his next big adventure... getting to 10,000 votes!