Dragon's Lair was one of the first laserdisc video games, released in June 1983 by Cinematronics. It featured polished Disney-like animation created by former Disney animator Don Bluth, and for the first time allowed players to control a fully realized character. Most other games of the era represented the character as a sprite, which consisted of a series of bitmaps animated by playing them in succession. However due to hardware limitations of the era, artists were greatly restricted in the detail they could achieve using that technique; the resolution, framerate and number of frames were severely constrained. Dragon's Lair overcame those limitations by tapping into the vast storage potential of laserdisc, which completely freed the artist, but imposed other limitations on the actual gameplay.