I never ever came close to beating this game. I know I tried a million times, to be turned down by a dragon's flame or falling into a well, or something liek that.
Fatman is right, you would need a pocket full of quarters to play that game, and even then, it would not be a long play. For those of you to young to remember arcades, the graphics for its time were amazing. The gameplay was a bit different than most games, as it would show the footage, and your movements based on the joystick were delayed.
It would play the video clip, and at the end of the clip you would need to make a decision on what to do, once you did, you would watch what you chose, then the next would proceed and so on.
Yeah the graphics of this game were leaps and bounds better than anything else in the arcades at the time. Well Pit Fighter was a contender maybe. Still not as good as Dragon's Lair.
My mom would never give me shit for the arcade. I usually had like 75 cents or a dollar for my arcade trip. After one quarter and getting about 30 seconds of gameplay on this, I'd call it quits.
Good shit on posting the ending. I'd never heard of anyone beating it at the arcade either.
Unless your mom did well on the slots in Vegas and let you use up her bucket of quarters, you weren't even getting close to the ending of this game.