Ha, for me it was just the opposite. Me and my friend at that time went to the fair arcades, and when we saw it the first time there, was that around 83, we were amazed. So we started putting all our coins into that machine, until eventually we knew the whole game by heart.
In the end we managed to get to the end with only 1 life, played through the last stage with the dragon and when you're supposed to hit the button to kill the dragon, we let ourselves die, thus had to restart the end boss level again, and finally only killed it with the last life, that way you got max points. I think you got 5 lives in total.
We even played the game at "home", someone said one level and we made the joystick movements, was just for training, we were quite crazy at that time
We did the same with Space Ace.
As far as I can remember the game was also double the coin price of the other arcade games.
