Excerpt taken from here :
http://www.atarimuseum.com/orubin/mailbag3.html
Owen: Laser Disk (LD) games. Too bad really, we never got very far on those games. Here is the story:
I spent two summer sessions at MIT in 77 and 78 (or maybe 78 and 79) educating myself on laser disk games and technology in the Architecture Machine Group (later to become the Media Lab), and basically came back to Atari and suggested that we did NOT do any games with LD. Bottom line, the technology would not survive the arcade environment, was slow and unreliable, and was very expensive for what you really got out of it. And I was right, but we started several games anyway. One was the turd Firefox, one was Road Runner which was GREAT, and WAS tested in an arcade, and then redesigned to not have the LD because it kept failing. Then we started Battlestar Galactica, for which an early LD was made but not much else.
On Knight Rider and Galactica, we went to Universal and got to look through a LOT of footage, some aired, some not of shots from the shows Knight Rider and Galactica. On Knight Rider, the game was going to be a driving game where you had to use KITT's special features to catch the bad guys. Jumping, speed, guns, electronic jamming, etc. It would be a combination graphics and video game (NOT like Firefox) with graphics better than most driving games and live video mixed in, and the voice of KITT helping you along in the game. When you did a stunt with KITT, you would see an instant replay of the stunt in live video from the show. We also had some great footage that was never seen. Like what REALLY happened to the cars (there were seven or eight of them always being repaired) after they made a jump. It really crumpled the front of the cars a lot, but that was edited out. If you missed a jump timing in the game for example, you would see the car land and crumple and you loose a life (or whatever). There were lots of outtakes that would have made great game play error footage. We never got much further than that as we killed all LD games shortly after Road Runner.
Roadrunner was similar. It used video game graphics for the game play almost identical to the game that was releases except that it used LD video instead of graphics for the background. Very cool to have the game graphics go in and out of cartoon footage. When the Roadrunner would "get" the coyote (like making him fall off a cliff or hit a truck) the game would pause and a LD "video replay" would show a real cartoon segment with that same thing that just happened. For example, in the game where the coyote has avoid stepping on the land mines, when he does, the game shows him getting blown-up in graphics, and then (not always) a video would show a real cartoon excerpt from a Roadrunner cartoon of the coyote getting blown up. It was very cool.
On Galactica, it was my idea originally as I was a Galactica fan obviously, (those are Cylon ships in Major Havoc, and the graphics displays in the tactical display were drawn like in Galactica as well), the guys who did Star Wars and Firefox started the project. I did a small amount of work as well. All that was really done was some footage on the LD that let you land a fighter ship into one of the landing bays on either side of the large ship.
I also did a Golf Simulator game where you actually hit real golf balls at a projection screen and the ball was projected the rest of the way. We recorded thousands of pictures of the Los Gatos golf course on a LD. When you started, we would project the view from the tee. You would hit a real ball with a real club, we has sensors that measured your swing, your weight balance, and where the ball hit the screen and we would calculate and project the ball on the screen onto the real course. After each shot, you could get a lesson from a Pro on something the system analyzed you might have done wrong, we measured so many things, and had about 200 lessons from golf pros. A graphic top down view would display where you shot went, and then we would display the next view. It had silly things like going into water hazard footage as well. I actually have the ONLY copy of the LD (I wonder if it still even plays, I have not tried for so long) that shows Galactica footage and the Golf footage. Neither was ever built.
The video on the disk is recorded in such a way that playing it back would look like garbage. It is a bunch of still frames that you play out of order so that you can change what you are playing seamlessly. For example, the landing footage is one of 9 to 16 or so frames from different positions as you approach the landing bay. Imaging a 3x3 of 4x4 grid of possible positions you can approach from, with the center being straight on. If you fly straight, the program would display every 9th frame which was the video of flying straight. If you moved right, you would select the proper "frame view" and it would look like you moved in the video to the right, and now play every 9th "right position 1" video frame in order. With this scheme, you could fly in 2 dimensions with the joystick while the game pushed you forward in the third as well, controlled by a throttle.
Anyway, I doubt there is any prototypes of any of these games, and what happened to the LD for Road Runner is anyone's guess.
Hope this helps some.