The Mega Drive Aladdin was such a success that Virgin got the gig again for Disney’s next film, this time producing a SNES version too. They produced another platformer well-remembered enough for Aladdin and The Lion King to be getting a joint nostalgic remaster treatment soon. I have my own fond memories of this one, complete with a story of unintentional accessibility tuning.
My siblings and I played the PC version of The Lion King, and loved its huge and inventive trip through the settings of the film. We even loved the weird, drifting music. We managed to play through it right to the very end, well past Simba’s transformation into adult lion form. It was only some time after reaching that end that we first booted the game up in DOS, rather than within Windows, and discovered that we had been playing it at something around 50% speed the whole time. Hence the music, a more extreme version of the Sonic PAL effect.
On games with designed-in gameplay personalisation (e.g. Celeste, to pick one I’ve been playing again recently) slowing down play is one option to make it easier to complete the required actions. Windows’s prcoessor-dominating powers achieving the same effect is something that The Lion King and my memories of it benefited from, because after starting off along similarly forgiving lines to Aladdin it quickly throws in some fast reaction tests which are very difficult indeed. On the Mega Drive there’s no escaping it.
Actually ‘very difficult’ doesn’t do full justice to the ostrich riding bit in the second level, which is one of the worst-designed bits of gameplay I’ve encountered in anything so far. The ostrich carries on out of your control and you have to duck under nests and sometimes jump over baby rhinos, with arrows initially pointing which way to go in advance. So far, so good. Then you get a double up arrow, and have to jump over a baby rhino and then jump over nests, and then… Simba suddenly rears back in pain and flops down to the ground, despite not having hit anything, like he’s trying to win a penalty. At that point you need to start all over and do some roaring-at-monkeys pinball to even get another chance. The riot of colour and spiky-looking foliage happening on screen at the time doesn’t exactly help identify what went wrong. At least when Spectrum games asked you to pull off ridiculous feats of platforming it was generally pretty clear what was happening; with this section I had to watch someone else playing it before getting that I’d been doing the second jump too early. Turns out it wasn’t that Simba was hitting anything, but that for some reason the game was failing him in advance of him doing so.
It’s a peculiar misstep because so many other aspects of the design of The Lion King are brilliant, as is apparent even just looking at the same level. The all-out intense colours, dazzling pinks and reds and oranges, are spectacular, and revealed with a suitable flourish as the level starts with a more reserved palette before quickly changing. Its piles of animals and jumps across the heads of giraffes conjure exactly the musical number feel it’s going for.
More widely, Virgin and Disney more than live up to the high standards of animation they set with Aladdin. The source material (the movie, not the ultimate source) lends itself a little less obviously to a platformer, but that turns out to be a strength. Controlling Simba, loping along and jumping, is different and fun in itself. He bounces on things in a very cute way! The player character being much more horizontal than the usual platformer also lends itself logically to a different, more horizontal level design which they follow through on inventively. The idea, pretty much enforced by the film, of having your character at a significant point mid-game turn from being a child to an adult, with accompanying changes of movement and leveling-up of powers, is a good one, again well executed. Indeed, it’s a good enough idea that this won’t be the last time we see it in this project.
Ultimately, we’re left with a lot of great work and ideas up against some really terrible decisions, and at a time when brute-force rote-learning levels was still a widespread requirement it’s not surprising that many players looked past that to a bright and enjoyable game. Even the players who didn’t have an accidental slow motion mode on their side.
Gallup cartridge chart, Computer Trade Weekly 20 February 1995 (chart for week to 11 February 1995)