Dragons, imagination and RPGs

I took this picture at Sundown Adventureland, a theme park for children and maybe some adults too. It had a lot of displays, including a dragon guarding a treasure that you could wake up. I took a few snapshots, including this one. Watching it so lifelike, I wished we had something like this where I was when we grew up. But my brothers and I had our imagination and this was enough for us. I was thinking about this recently, and before we played Dungeons & Dragons when we reached teenage, a lot of our childhood make belief games were basically medieval fantasy games: we played knights, wizards, rogues and we fought all sorts of critters like this one, hoarded treasures and visited many places. Of course, dangerous forests or sinister swamps were our home's back garden (or or friend's) and the taverns and castles were our front porch. We needed little else to create fantastic worlds, except the odd piece of fiction (this movie and these books). Our D&Dr campaign is a direct product of these games and a lot of the elements we had in these old pseudo medieval games were transformed in our campaign setting.