I played and spent plenty of quarters and eventually able to finish it each time,until the owners or whoever decided it was a good reason to have it freeze on purpose at some point preventing it from ever be finished again at that location. This was back when video game arcades were still the place to go,before home console gaming wasn't too big compared to today.
Yeah they set it hard so that almost no one gets to the end and there's no continue.
Sounds more like the laserdisc decaying or the reader breaking down. Possibly both.
The original laserdisc players shipped with the game (Pioneer LD-V1000 or PR-7820) often failed. Although the players were of good quality, the game imposed unusually high strain: LaserDisc players were designed primarily for playing movies, in which the laser assembly would gradually move across the disc as the data was read linearly. However, Dragon's Lair required seeking different animation sequences on the disc every few secondsindeed, less than a second in some casesas dictated by gameplay. The high amount of seeking, coupled with the length of time the unit was required to operate, could result in failure of the laserdisc player after a relatively short time. This was compounded by the game's popularity. As a result, the laserdisc player often had to be repaired or replaced. The life of the original player's gas laser was about 650 hours; although later models had solid state lasers with an estimated life of 50,000 hours, the spindle motor typically failed long before that. It is rare to find a Dragon's Lair game intact with the original player, and conversion kits have been developed so the units can use more modern players. The original USA 1983 game used a single side NTSC laserdisc player manufactured by Pioneer; the other side of the disc was metal backed to prevent bending. The European versions of the game were manufactured by Atari under license and used single side PAL discs manufactured by Philips (not metal backed).