It was an odd invitation, and one that was impossible to turn down. Don Bluth was doing promotion for Tapper: World Tour, and he was available for interviews during the Game Developers Conference. The legendary animator had started at Disney, and then went solo to work on movies and projects as diverse as An American Tale, the Secret of NIMH, Titan A.E., and, of course, the Dragon's Lair arcade machine. Now, like everyone else in the world, he has made an iOS game, giving the bar-game Tapper a new look for modern audiences.

Don Bluth is now in his 70s, but is a strong presence in person. He's funny and smart, and knows how to hold his own in an interview. We talked about what he brings to modern games, the creation of Dragon's Lair, and why he doesn't pay attention to most of today's new games.

So why a game, now?

"Gary Goldman and I have been working together for years, and he picked up the phone and asked if I'd like to work on another game," Bluth told me. They wanted the game to have a different look, and his ears perked up. "I like artwork. I like to create something that looks beautiful and carries you away. I've always been revved up about that kind of work." His job was to design the characters and the look of the game so that it had a fresh face and stood out from other iPhone and iPad games. "But gameplay? That's not me."

I was able to see the game for a bit, and it did look different. The characters were distinct. You could distract the bar patrons by offering different kinds of entertainment depending on the setting. This wasn't "Beer" Tapper, but it also didn't specify what the liquids were. I was told that as long as they didn't call them alcoholic beverages, they wouldn't have problems with the game's rating. The game looks great, and it benefits from the classic animation style. Still, I was there covering it, and a large part of that was the man in front of me. Did he ever worry about projects using him more for his name than his skill?

"By sad experience I've learned that lesson," he said. "What I do is to keep peeking and watching and watching and watching. It has to be something I care about, and I have to think the look is worthwhile. I've done the other route, where people take my name and ride me to town, and that's not what happened here," He said he was heavily involved in how the game's aesthetics came together, and was pleased with the results. "To me, entertainment is about characters, not plot."

The largest difference between animating a film and a game? "There's a little bit of a limit in a game, because of the technology. Constantly I said 'let's do this and this and this!' and they told me we couldn't do that." The difference is that games have to deal with an active player, a limitation that doesn't effect films or television work. I asked Bluth if he pays much attention to modern games.

"Only enough to know that I shouldn't pay any more attention." He said he gets overloaded. "I can't do it very well, and even if I could accomplish [playing the game] I'm not sure what that says about my creativity. My life is about creating something that wasn't there three minutes ago. I want to create something, I want to make something... but it takes all people to make a world."

He also pointed out that while he's worked in multiple media, pure creation is what drives him. "I still love traditional animation. I love drawing with a pencil, because there's a feeling... Some people don't understand what I'm saying here, but there's a feeling of it coming out of your brain, you see it in your head, it goes down your arm through the pencil onto the paper. That's an exercise, and it's a thrilling one. It's like what athletes get by running and beating a record." That's drawing and design though, and Bluth explained that he just loves animation. "I'm fine with the traditional world and the CGI world. I've seen people do it with push-pins and sand, claymation—there's all kinds." The important thing is that the art fuels the experience. "I want to forget that someone drew it. I want to get caught in something... two hours is a long time."

He brought up the silent movie star Lillian Gish, who said that movies are not innocent things—we sit in the dark and we give them hours of our lives. "What happens to you is that your molecules are re-arranged, you are affected by what you see. When you walk out of that theater, you are a little different." She said this on the Merv Griffin show, and she looked at the camera and told people who create things to keep that in mind, that you're changing the way people think.

He asked himself if gaming does the same thing, with the same high standards. "Are [games] influencing people in the way we think? In some ways yes, if you make the right thing. It's the same thing. It's done through entertainment, but we imitate art."